Daily Dose Equities - Wall Street Analysis for Biomedical Research

Rodman & Renshaw has released a report in conjuction with Pharm3r about a data-mining project to crowd source opinions and in interest in new drugs on Twitter. Pharm3r is unique data-mining company that tags plain text in order to mine such disparate sources as chat boards, blogs, and Twitter feeds.

Analyst Michael King, Jr. writes,

"Our first foray into this novel approach to crowd-sourcing opinions and views on various topics begins with the recent 2012 American Academy of Neurology (AAN), which took place April 21-28 in New Orleans. While AAN deals with dozens of topics, Pharm3r gathered views on the 24 most common discussions. Relevant tweets were scanned for a predetermined list of topics between April 20th and 30th. Each topic is also accompanied by a sentiment score...

We view the combination of Twitter volume (number of tweets) and sentiment of those tweets as highly relevant data points in assessing interest in a drug within a period of time. The ability to view that interest compared to other relevant drugs at a time of high interest and tweeting provide an opportunity for potential insight into clinician, patient, and investor interest."

The results from the project include the following:

"Starting with multiple sclerosis (MS), the updated safety regulation in the US and EU spurred a significant volume of relatively negatively tweets for Gilenya (fingolimod), while Lemtrada (alemtuzumab) and BG-12 tweets generated relatively high sentiment...Turning to therapies for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), CK2017357 (‘357) from Cytokinetics (CYTK, Market Outperform) bested Biogen’s dexpramipexole in both volume and sentiment."