Feurstein Tweet Shaves 16% From Targacept; Key Drug Fails Phase IIb Trial

Shares of Targacept

fell as much as 16 percent Monday following a tweet from TheStreet.com's Adam Feurstein. Shares recovered part of their swoon, trading recently at $4.08 down 8 percent. A "system glitch" caused Targacept to inadvertently post on its Web news of the failure of its Azheimer drug candidate in a Phase IIb study. The post was apparently made before informing NASDAQ officials that a regulatory trading halt for news would be required on the company's shares. Feurstein, apparently using a Web crawler, picked up the news release and tweeted https://twitter.com/adamfeuerstein a screen shot of it before the company was able to remove the information from its Web site. Following attendance to stock market protocol, the company re-posted the release. "Based on these results, we do not intend to invest in further development' of the drug, called TC-1734, Chief Executive Stephen A. Hill said in a statement "After 52 weeks of treatment the drug did not meet the objective of showing superiority to donepezil, the marketed medication most often prescribed for Alzheimer's disease," the company said.