Acadia Pharmaceuticals stock and pipeline

ACADIA Pharmaceuticals Inc (ACAD)

This quiet little stock has been slowly increasing since June. The stock has outperformed the Dow and S&P 500 during trading in June.

So what does Acadia do for a business? Acadia has several preclinical and clinical trials going to treat Alzheimer’s disease psychosis. The drug pimavanserin is an inverse agonist on the serotonin receptor subtype 5-HT_2a.  An inverse agonist binds to the receptor as an agonist, but induces the opposite response.  The level of activity of the receptor needs to decrease basal levels of the receptor when it binds.  Recently preclinical studies of pimavanserin are being developed for Parkinson’s disease psychosis and is said to be already in Phase III trial for Parkinson’s disease psychosis (Dow Jones News) and may also have therapeutic benefits in treatment of Alzheimer’s disease psychosis (ADP) as seen in a rodent model of Alzheimer’s disease (Businesswire). Interesting Wikipedia takes a more negative view on the efficacy of pimavanserin on ADP.

So all that being said, what does this mean for the stock? Well it has been upgraded 10 days ago by Reuters to neutral and Second opinion upgraded it 7 days ago to improving.  The below graph provides you some insight into the last 3 months.

My 2 cents? Well, this is a tricky stock, since it seems that it’s  stock performance is based on only one drug. My question is what other drugs are in the pipeline and how far are they along? Well if you go to their website, http://www.acadia-pharm.com/pipeline/ you can see that by far pimavanserin has the lead over other companies such as Allergan. Acadia is also working on some preclinical studies for ERb and Nurr-1.

Unfortunately they do not define ERb and Nurr-1 on their website, but presumably  ERb is estrogen receptor beta and Nurr-1 is actually NURR1, which is a nuclear receptor involved in intracellular signaling with complex of proteins called CoREST  which assembles chromatin- modifying enzymes.  It is also modified by sumoylation and works with glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3) to function. GSK3 is also involved in canonical Wnt signaling which has been moved to the forefront in neurobiology these days.

I think it is too soon to know whether they are on to something or not, but NURR1 has been associated with dopaminergic dysfunction in Parkingson’s disease, schizophrenia, manic depression, and mis-regulation of NURR1 is associated with rheumatoid arthritis. There are a lot of question to be answered on how all this happens, but it will be interesting to see if the scientists at ACADIA can figure it out!

I think if you want to speculate, it might be worth the purchase and the ride. What do you think?

-JR

(PS.. I don’t own the stock, but I’m thinking about it

PSS… all statements are my own opinions based on the research I did on the stock. You can take or leave my opinions for what they are worth…)

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Images from Scottrade (thanks Scottrade!)