bob posted you a big news about Ausssie. Looks like I was wrong about the BIG news. "This is the tip of the iceberg"
washingtonpost.com
"Celera Says It's Wooing More Big Clients"
By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2000;
Fresh off a triumphal announcement at the White House, Celera Genomics Corp. said last night that it had signed up a new client for its genetic databases:
Australia.
The news, disclosed early this morning in the Australian Parliament, comes as the Rockville company struggles to convince Wall Street it has a product that people might want to buy.
The deal with Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council creates a standard mechanism by which any academic or nonprofit research institution in the country can gain access to Celera's genetic databases of the human and of two important research organisms, the fruit fly and the mouse. With the fees heavily subsidized by the Australian government, a large majority of research institutions are expected to take advantage of the offer. Celera did not disclose financial terms.
"This arrangement is particularly exciting for Australian researchers," Warwick Anderson, chairman of Australia's main research committee, said in a statement, "as Celera's technology is believed to be of the highest standard and the agreement should allow rapid dissemination of crucial genetic information to publicly funded researchers."
The deal is the latest development in a tumultuous week for Celera. The company's president and chief scientific officer, J. Craig Venter, stood with his publicly financed rival, Francis Collins, at the White House on Monday as President Clinton announced that their respective groups had put together the first maps of the human genome.
The company spent the rest of the week trying to reassure nervous investors, who drove the stock down 21 percent in two days amid fears that Celera would not be able to follow its scientific triumph with a workable business plan. The stock bounced upward yesterday as rumors began to circulate about the Australian deal.
Venter said the timing was unrelated to the market dip but he hopes that signing up an entire country's scientists as customers will go some way toward alleviating investor concerns.
"I haven't been fooling when I say we've had a lot of discussions going on with a lot of places," he said. "This is the tip of the iceberg."
Venter and colleagues turned the world of gene research upside down two years ago when they announced that they would create a private company to decode the exact sequence of chemicals in the human genome, the master blueprint of life, beating publicly funded researchers to the goal. They were met with withering skepticism in the scientific world that they could pull it off and equal skepticism in the business world that they could make money doing so.
Monday's announcement in the East Room of the White House ? which followed an agreement by the rival camps to quit fighting and call the race a tie ? appears to have alleviated the first concern, but not the second. Since Celera plans to give away raw data about the human genome, investors seem to be at a loss as to how it will make money.
Celera's answer is that the giveaway is a loss leader that can attract scientists to the company's more elaborate paid offerings. These include robust tools for analyzing the human genome and, at least as significant, a map of the genome of the mouse by late this year. Mice are a critical experimental organism in biology, and the mouse genome is expected to shed crucial light on the origin and function of human genes.
More and more scientists, as they learn the full scope of Celera's plans, seem to be afraid not to sign up. Vanderbilt University recently became the first academic institution to cut a deal with Celera. Immunex Corp. of Seattle this week became the first biotechnology company to do so. A half-dozen big pharmaceutical companies have already signed up for fees as high as $15 million a year. Celera is known to be negotiating with numerous parties, including other countries that want to sign up all their scientists at once.
"Academics are competitive people," said Paul Gilman, Celera's director of policy planning. "They get that we've got data and we've got good data. Then we drop on them the mouse thing and they go 'Holy mackerel!'?"
Celera stock rose yesterday for the first time this week, closing at $108.50, a one-day gain of 9 percent. |
