Targacept (TRGT) is a company 30 years in the making. It all started when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, RJRT, decided to form a nicotine basic research group. The group, which eventually became the four founders of Targacept, came together in the mid 1980s and published nearly 300 peer reviewed papers and abstracts about nicotine and its receptors. If the various therapeutic benefits and side effects of nicotine could be teased apart, RJRT realized it might be sitting on a huge pharmaceutical opportunity...
