An­a­lyst Bri­an Sko­r­ney goes griz­zly on Bio­gen’s Alzheimer’s ‘hype,’ ‘fear­mon­ger­ing’ and ‘sta­tis­ti­cal mal­prac­tice’

Baird’s Bri­an Sko­r­ney took a bite out of Bio­gen $BI­IB to­day.

The an­a­lyst out­lined his bear the­sis on Bio­gen’s bull­ish take on its prospects for their Alzheimer’s drug ad­u­canum­ab in back-to-back notes out ear­ly Mon­day — maul­ing the com­pa­ny’s ar­gu­ments in a griz­zly-sized at­tack on the com­pa­ny, its ex­ecs and the sus­pect drug. And the clawed swipe forced a 2.4% drop in the share price at Bio­gen Mon­day morn­ing — a siz­able drop for a com­pa­ny with a $54 bil­lion mar­ket cap.

First, Sko­r­ney warns in­vestors that we’ve been here be­fore. First Bio­gen trig­gers a big run-up in shares when it touts tri­al re­sults, then watch­es the bleed­ing in red as the hard da­ta un­der­cut their as­ser­tions. That hap­pened with BAN2401, and he ex­pects it to hap­pen again with ad­u­canum­ab lat­er this week dur­ing the CTAD meet­ing, where Bio­gen promised to re­veal all.

The fu­ture of this drug may well ride on two key points, the nu­mer­i­cal ad­van­tage in CDR-SB, where Bio­gen claimed to see a sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in their EMERGE study. Sko­r­ney es­ti­mates that will come out as a dis­ap­point­ing 0.4, slight­ly un­der Ari­cept — which was ap­proved with mar­gin­al ben­e­fits — and ever so slight­ly more than solanezum­ab, Eli Lil­ly’s big flop.

Here’s Sko­r­ney:

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