By Lynnley Browning, Globe Staff

BEAR PROFILES DynaGen, Inc. Palomar Medical Technologies Inc. Designs Inc. Converse Inc. SystemSoft Corp. MAIN STORY Bulls and Bears

ynaGen has spent recent months watching its stock price go up in smoke after its flagship product, a smoking-cessation aid called NicErase, failed in clinical trials last summer.

The tiny Cambridge-based biotechnology company is now trying to ignite a turnaround by refocusing itself as a producer and marketer of generic drugs. But the plan has yet to catch on with investors.

''The company has now shifted from an R&D company to a manufacturing and distribution operation of generic drugs,'' said chairman Dhananjay G. Wadekar.

DynaGen, which went public in 1990 at $1 per share, hit a peak of nearly $69 in January 1993 but has been sliding since. It now hovers around 55 cents. Over a one-year period through March, the stock lost more than 96 percent of its value.

NicErase was based on lobeline, an Indian tobacco used in some over-the-counter smoking-cessation products until the Food and Drug Administration objected in 1993. DynaGen had hoped that injectable NicErase, tweaked with a time-release mechanism, would compete with nicotine patches.

A no-frills company whose original mission was to buy promising technologies for bargain-basement prices from universities and research centers, DynaGen is waiting for the patents to expire on drugs such as Pyridium, a bladder analgesic, and other women's health drugs so that it can manufacture and sell them.

Wadekar admits investors are not yet biting. ''The shift has not been understood or accepted by the Street,'' he said.

But he still forecasts DynaGen's revenues nearly tripling to $35 million this year from $12 million last year and $500,000 in 1996. ''Yes,'' he said, ''there is a plan."