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Spherix Shares Jump 69% On Diabetes Drug News
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 24, 2006; Page D04
Spherix Inc., a Beltsville firm that makes reservations for national parks and is also pursuing a diabetes treatment, saw its shares soar 69 percent yesterday, to $3.52, after announcing that its executives had returned from an overseas trip where they inspected facilities of a clinical research organization in preparation for final human testing of the diabetes drug.
Two weeks earlier, on March 9, Spherix had agreed to sell 585,792 shares of its stock to a Connecticut hedge fund for $2.04 a share, according to documents filed with the
The fund, Forest Investment Management LLC
, in August 2004 had been given an option to purchase the shares at $7 apiece, according to the SEC documents.
Spherix agreed to lower the price on condition that the company buy the stock right away, according to the filings.
The company disclosed the arrangement on March 15.
More than 8 million shares of Spherix stock traded hands yesterday, compared with a daily average of about 200,000 shares over the past year.
Spherix chief executive Richard Levin said the firm lowered Forest's purchase price because the company needed to raise money to pay for the human testing of its potential drug and to maintain the capital needed to keep its stock listed on the Nasdaq National Market board.
Spherix announced in December that federal regulators had given the go-ahead for final testing of its compound to treat Type 2 diabetes, a product the firm's founder and chairman, Gilbert V. Levin, discovered three decades ago while preparing an experiment for travel to Mars.
The stock jumped 287 percent on the news. In the days after, Gilbert Levin sold 61,300 of his 2.4 million shares for between $4.59 and $4.75, cashing out an estimated $285,000. The share price has fallen steadily since then.
About a month later, Spherix announced that it had hired Environ International Inc. to help plan and oversee clinical testing of the diabetes drug.
Levin said the firm's announcement yesterday, which came in a news release, contained little, if any, new information.
"There's nothing in that release that we haven't released before," he said. "It's just shocking to me that we generated this much activity on this news. Most of what we had said in there we had announced before."
He added, "It's our way of letting people know that we were progressing toward doing the clinical trial