A noite da manipulação no complexo médico-industrial-midiático.

Todo ano é a mesma coisa, a reunião da ASCO provoca asco. Trata-se maior manipulação da informação no complexo médico-industrial-midiático. Há dez anos houve um caso exemplar: um mero abstract alavancou muito as ações de uma empresa farmacêutica devido ao potencial efeito do medicamento envolvido. Quando o paper foi publicado, o resultado era desapontador. Mas, quem já tinha ganho na alta .....Abaixo, post do blogueiro do The Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Drug Analysts to Pull All-Nighter Tomorrow Posted by Jacob Goldstein Tomorrow night, at 9 p.m. Eastern, American Society of Clinical Oncology is going to release the results of thousands of cancer studies that will be presented at the group’s big annual meeting. At least a few of those are likely to be market-moving, especially the ones that involve small biotechs whose future rests on a single cancer drug. But the trick is finding the market-moving needles in a haystack of data — and doing it before the markets open Friday morning. Michael King, a biotech analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, figures he’ll stay up all night looking through the data, trying to see what it will mean for companies such as Regeneron and Onyx, Bloomberg reports. And he figures scores of his rival analysts are likely to do the same. In the past, ASCO sent out abstract books to member doctors a few weeks before the conference, but the data were supposed to remain secret until they were presented at the conference. This led to some allegations that people were trading on data that were supposedly still under wraps. So ASCO decided this year to eliminate the embargo problem altogether. King told Bloomberg he prefers the new system. “Although it’s a pain, putting it out on the Web for everyone to see is the best way to do it,” he said. Of course, some analysts aren’t waiting for the abstracts to make bets about what the data will hold. Morgan Stanley analyst Steven Harr on Monday lowered his rating on ImClone, which makes the cancer drug Erbitux. The company’s stock fell more than 7% Monday, before recovering a bit yesterday.