Drugmaker Medigen Biotechnology Co (基亞生技) yesterday said it would take legal action against Chinese-language Wealth magazine (財訊) for a report alleging Medigen’s development plan for its liver cancer drug PI-88 was a fraud.
Wealth magazine reported on Wednesday that Medigen deliberately downplayed a report issued on April 10 by the US’ National Institute of Health (NIH), which allegedly said that PI-88 was not effective, and delayed the announcement of the results of its clinical trials to create the illusion that PI-88 was still likely to pass interim analysis.
The magazine reported that while making investors hopeful, some Medigen shareholders were selling the company’s stocks before the results of the interim analysis were disclosed.
However, Medigen said the magazine report was erroneous.
Wealth magazine made a mistake by wrongly saying the report it cited was a report published by the NIH, when it was a thesis published by the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology, Medigen chairman Stanley Chang (張世宗) yesterday said at a press conference.
The thesis said the effectivity of PI-88 is not yet proven, instead of claiming that the drug is ineffective, and it only used Medigen’s phase-two research data of the drug, Chang added.
Chen Pei-jer (陳培哲), an academic at Academia Sinica who is in charge of Medigen’s clinical trials, said the protocol of the trials was approved by the government before the trials started, and Medigen made regular reports to the government concerning the progress of the trials. As a result, it was impossible to manipulate the trials, he added.
The chairman also denied rumors that the company’s officials tried to drive up the share price by cooperating with illegal fund managers, and that the company was harassed by gangsters hired by these managers because they suffered great losses in buying Medigen’s shares.
Chang said none of the company’s board members face financial problems because they use Medigen shares to borrow money from banks, which is also contrary to the report.
“We dedicated ourselves to creating a new drug to treat liver cancer and our personnel are still doing the same thing now,” Medigen chief financial officer Bill Ou (歐朝銓) said yesterday by telephone. “However, after the interim analysis, Medigen seems to suddenly have become a different company for domestic media.”
Ou said some of the nation’s media outlets interpret the information they gather about Medigen in a most extreme way.
However, the company’s shares still declined by the maximum daily amount of 7 percent for the 14th day yesterday to close at NT$161, underperforming the over-the-counter bench-mark index, which was down 0.63 percent.
The company is unable to implement a share buyback scheme to stop its shares from falling because it had not swung back into the black yet, Ou said.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is