The following are websites that every biotech stock investor should have in their internet bookmarks. While we don’t use all of these websites on a daily basis, we use most of them quite often and using them can save a lot of time when researching all aspects of a drug developer’s operations.

Without further ado, here are many of the most important subscription-free websites for biotech investors (organized by theme):

REGULATORY AND CLINICAL TRIAL INFORMATION

1. Quickest way to find an FDA approved drug’s label and approval history:

www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/drugsatfda/index.cfm

2. Quickest way to find a European Union approved drug’s label and approval history:

www.emea.europa.eu/htms/human/epar/a.htm

3. Quickest way to find information about most drug candidates in clinical trials:

www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/search

4. The most recent FDA Advisory Committee website updates (transcripts of meetings, briefing documents, etc)

www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/acwhatsnew.htm

5. FDA Advisory Committee meeting documents sorted by date from 1997 to present

www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/acmenu.htm

6. FDA Guidance Documents (very useful if you want to find out what the FDA’s requirements are for a drug to get approved to treat a particular indication like diabetes)

www.fda.gov/opacom/morechoices/industry/guidedc.htm

7. FDA’s Orange Book approved drug patent and marketing exclusivity search (very useful to find out when a drug may be facing generic competition)

www.fda.gov/cder/ob/default.htm

8. England’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)

www.nice.org.uk

9. Japan’s Ministry of Health (useful only if you can read Japanese)

www.mhlw.go.jp/english

10. Pubmed

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

11. National Cancer Institute (loads of statistics for modeling purposes)

www.cancer.gov

DRUG MARKETING AND SALES

1. National Comprehensive Cancer Network Compendium (requires free registration). This compendium and a few others are what insurers and CMS use to determine whether they will pay for the off-label usage of a drug. Since the majority of oncology drugs are used in an off-label setting, knowing when a compendium recommends using a drug becomes MORE important than knowing what a drug is FDA or EMEA approved to treat.

www.nccn.org/Registration/login/login.aspx?s=DC

2. Use this link to see what tiers insurers are placing drugs on (the higher the tier, the more the drug will cost the patient out-of-pocket and the lower sales will be, ceteris paribus)

www.medicare.gov

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

1. Pharmalot blog (stopped producing new content at the end of 2008 but still contains loads of interesting information and stories)

www.pharmalot.com

2. In the Pipeline blog

pipeline.corante.com

3. Patent Baristas blog

www.patentbaristas.com

4. Adam Feuerstein’s articles at thestreet.com

www.thestreet.com/author/1352996/AdamFeuerstein/all.html

5. Wall Street Journal’s health blog

blogs.wsj.com/health

6. SIGNALS Magazine (produces loads of original and insightful content)

www.signalsmag.com

When we look at the bookmarked links on our computers, there are plenty of other websites that we’ve saved and often reference but the problem is that they are usually not free for retail investors (unless you are in academia sometimes). For instance, every day we find ourselves reading numerous journal articles but for most investors, the only way to access journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association or Nature Biotechnology is to pony up the cash for a subscription or to go to your local library and read them.

Sometimes you can get access to a database of journals for free via your public library if they have a website.  Since researching journal articles is a must for any biotech investor, you should find a way to get access to some of the bigger journal databases.

Other pay-to-play websites like IMS Health are also invaluable to us in drug sales forecasting or for following macro trends in the pharmaceutical industry. Retail investors can usually get this information at some point in the information cycle but not when it’s ripest unless they are willing to fork over the (often) expensive subscription fees.

While we are hesitant to say that access to information like the prescription trends/reports that a service like IMS reports are always completely necessary (better word for completely necessary), we would say that sometimes it is impossible to ascribe a “most accurate” price estimate for a drug developer’s cash flows and valuation without access to this information.

We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention using a drug’s developer’s own web pages as a valuable source of information. Drugmakers always have a page on their website that outlines the progress of their pipelines and while, these pages are not always optimally up-to-date, they can be time-savers (at least in the early stages of researching a company). Below are a couple of example of drugmakers’ pipeline pages:

Here is Merck’s (NYSE: MRK) pipeline page:

www.merck.com/finance/pipeline.swf

Here is Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ (Nasdaq: VRTX) pipeline page:

www.vrtx.com/current-projects.html

Here is Arena Pharmaceuticals’ (Nasdaq: ARNA) pipeline page:

www.arenapharm.com/wt/page/home.html

Think we missed any useful or timesaving websites for biotech investors? Feel free to email us at tips@biotechspeculators.com