Monday will be a big day for the biotechnology company Celgene. At 3:45p ET, the embargo will apparently lift on new data for its drug Revlimid in an earlier stage of the blood cancer known as multiple myeloma.
Researchers will present the test results in New Orleans at the annual meeting of The American Society of Hematology aka ASH. Analysts say if the results are robust, sales of the drug could go up a lot. Celgene is a big cap stock, but with the data coming out with just 15 minutes left in the trading day, I wonder if they’ll halt the stock. A bunch of other companies, most of them pretty small, are also releasing data at the meeting starting today, but CELG is widely considered to be the marquee event.
Meantime, I’m kicking off a crusade here to try to get ASH to change its name.
ASH has to be the absolute worst acronym. And we actually have two ASHes. One of them is The American Society of Hematology. The other is The American Society of Hypertension. Why would any organization, unless you’re an anti-smoking group attempting a clever turn of phrase, want ASH as its acronym? It has such a negative connotation.
For example, the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, rather than being known as the mouthful “AASLD Meeting,” has smartly and uniquely branded its annual scientific confab as “The Liver Meeting.” I like it for its simplicity and user-friendliness. It sounds accessible to the layman. I’m not so sure “The Blood Meeting” would work as well for ASH, but there’s gotta be a better name.
Any ideas? Leave them in the comments section.
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