TheStreet.com reporter accused of colluding with shorts

Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist for The Washington Post, writes about TheStreet.com biotech reporter Adam Feuerstein and what he believes is overly negative coverage about a biotech company.

Pearlstein writes, “Or consider Feuerstein’s posts in May and June concerning a presentation by Northwest Bio’s chief executive, Linda Powers, at the big annual cancer research conference, in which she described how one patient had responded to the company’s therapy.

“In both columns, Feuerstein expressed outrage that a drug company would exploit the suffering of patients for commercial gain (imagine that!) by selectively releasing results from a Phase I/II trial. He quoted Dr. Aman Buzdar, the head of clinical research at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the lead hospital for the Northwest Bios trial, criticizing the company for taking the ‘unusual and inappropriate’ step of releasing such information. If Buzdar had first checked with his colleagues, however, he would have found that two of them had recently appeared in a National Geographic documentary focused on just such interim results from a pancreatic cancer patient. And, as CREW noted in its letter to the SEC, Buzdar himself made positive comments at a 1999 conference about a breast cancer drug he was testing that was still in clinical trials.

“Then last week Feuerstein declared that the approval by London was really a ‘non-news event’ because only one other company had applied for a similar approval since the program was launched in April. It was all just a smokescreen, he explained, to divert attention from the unfavorable terms on which Northwest Bio had recently raised another $27 million from investors in a hostile funding environment — a hostile funding environment, we should note, that Feuerstein himself had helped to create.

“Feuerstein declined to speak to me last week, but his editor said she was sticking by her ‘dynamic’ reporter. When I asked whether Feuerstein had been in contact with the shorts, she would only say that he was in touch with a wide range of investors. Using thestreet.com’s journalistic standards, the headline on that might be: ‘Biotech reporter concedes he may be exchanging information with shorts.'”

Read more here. TheStreet.com editor in chief Janet Guyon told Talking Biz News that it has asked for a retraction and written a letter to the editor of the Post. “We have no questions about Adam’s integrity,” said Guyon.