2011, 2:37 pm EST
Shares of Star Scientific, a manufacturer of smokeless tobacco products, have been surging for the past few days on news that it may have discovered a possible treatment for Alzheimer's Disease.
Shares are up around 11% today and are up over 46% over the last 5 days.
Note: this stock is not worth much to begin with, at $2.64 a share.
Money manager James Altucher pointed out the Alzheimer's treatment potential of the discovery in an article for Seeking Alpha. Star buried the preliminary results in complicated legal jargon and very technical press releases, but it's there, according to Altucher.
The big news it didn't make clear was the the company isolated a compound in nicotine called antabine which reduces the protein amyloid. Amyloid is what many scientists believe to be the main cause of Alzheimer's.
From James Altucher (emphasis ours):
The result? Which they don’t say in the press release but they do say in a totally obtuse fashion at the website: is that CIGrX blows away Lipitor. Lipitor reduces inflammation in inflamed human brain tissue by about 30% in the graphic and CIGrx by about 100%. Pretty neat. Nothing in history has done that before. What does it mean? It means that if inflammation cause Alzheimer's, and a host of other disease, which it probably does (according to a 1000 research papers on the internet) then CIGrx probably cures it. But I guess we will know in three months for sure when the same institute that put $1mm into the stock and did this study on the inflamed human brain tissue now does a 3 months experiment on actual humans.
The drug still has a long way to go including the Roskamp Institute study that will last three months and then it will begin the tough road to FDA approval.
This could be huge for the company, which has had revenue below $1 million for the last fe |
