Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Welcome - Quick Intro

Firstly, I want to thank you for taking the time to visit my blog. Obviously, if you have made it this far, you probably have an interest in Celsion corporation, in some capacity. You might be an investor or potential investor, or perhaps your interest in Celsion is the result of doing general research in the oncology space. Regardless, I hope the information you find here will be of some interest to you.

And me? Why am I here and why did I set this up? I am a current shareholder of the company. I actually stumbled upon Celsion after being a shareholder in Delcath, another company competing in the liver cancer space. Typically, I am not an active investor by any means, so the vast majority of my portfolio consists of boring index funds from Vanguard (hard to argue against index funds). A small, but non-trivial, portion of my portfolio is devoted to what many would call "lottery biotechs", although in my case, I have only made very few such investments, and only one stock at a time. Celsion will likely be my last foray into this speculative world, "win" or "lose". Because I don't fundamentally believe in stock picking per se, one might say I overdo it a bit in terms of due diligence (DD) when it comes to my investments, and particularly, for Celsion (So much so, dare I say, that I have received countless tweets asking if I work for Celsion in disguise, lol). I began sharing a lot of my thoughts/links to research reports via Twitter, but of course, that has its own inherent limitations. Under the moniker "Biopharmpr", I have also posted regularly on the Yahoo CLSN message board, where, I also met some other extremely dedicated, bright and passionate investors (unfortunately, the board gets spammed to death).

In the end, I set this blog up to share with you, in detail, all of the research, journal articles, presentations, along with some of my own thoughts that have, and continue, to inform my investment decision. After my own initial investment decision in Celsion, my DD "work" only became much more intense. As I have tweeted before and made clear to those who know me, I am constantly trying to disprove my own investment rationale. So, it is with an open-mind and desire to challenge my thinking that I embark on the DD hunt. And, make no mistake, it has been very time-consuming, as a lot of important and relevant materials regarding HCC or RFA in general are scattered across various journals. Hopefully, my site will centralize a significant amount of literature for your convenience.

To provide some further color about myself, I am a professional in the health care industry, and formally have done management consulting for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, particularly within the realms of pricing and market access. While I no longer work within the pharmaceutical/biotech industry, I remain extremely passionate and excited to monitor the progress of therapies targeting high unmet need areas that might significantly improve the health and well-being of patients. Above that, I do consider myself a "student" of the health care industry, and am simply fascinated by the broader systemic reforms impacting not only the US health care system, but those of other countries as well. So, pharma and biotechs really only represent a sliver of my total interest in health care.

So, there you have it, who I am, why I set this up, and a little background about my rationale for investing in Celsion. This will not be a site to "pump" Celsion in any way, shape or form. In fact, I truly detest such acts that I see (long and short) all the time, especially with speculative biotech plays. Instead, I will try to be as objective as possible and let you make your own decision. So, you won't see me "spin" or selectively "interpret" the articles and research that I post, that will be your job :-)

Good luck, and thank you once again.

Sincerely,
Siavoche