Last night I attended a talk by Brian J. Younger, Biotech Analyst and Fidelity Select Biotechnology Fund Manager, given at the Harvard Biotech Club. Missed the first part of the talk unfortunately, but here's roughly what I got:
He's a very young guy, but seemed plenty smart and knowledgeable. Lots of neat data from studies that FIDO commissioned - I'd sure like to have their resources.
First he addressed the challenges facing the drug industry - the basic problem is that drug development time has actually been increasing even taking into account the quicker FDA approvals. Further, the number of NCE's from the pharmas is not matching the needed replacement rate. (For the top 50 companies, they were 30 NCE's short in 1999.) Finally, the exclusivity time for a drug has been decreasing (the time before there is a "me-too" competitor).
The solution is genomics. Trotted out the claim that all existing drugs are based on 420 targets, but that genomics will give us 10k new targets. (But not clear yet how "druggable" these targets will be).
The key bottleneck is target and lead optimization. The solution is MLNM. <g> (Not quite, but one could certainly get that impression from his talk).
Talked a fair amount about pharmacogenomics. He said there were already some clinical trials using it. He also mentioned the BMY/MLNM deal on taxol - an attempt to regenerate the drug. (Maybe a use patent if they figure out just where it will work or not?).
Also talked about the change in the terms of the pharma/biotech deals - e.g., OSIP should get a 50/50 deal, MLNM gets 10% on technology transfer deals, HGSI gets 20% on the SKB drugs developed from its database (although this was an early deal). Overall biotech getting a much better deal than 5 years ago or even 3 years ago.
Pick&shovel-type stocks he mentioned:
Applied Biosystems ("the Cisco of the industry")
Waters
MLNM
Celera
ABGX
MEDX
Exelexis
INCY
On biotech, said that they would get $350m this year from partnerships, and $3 billion through 2005. These are upfront numbers and don't include milestones or royalties.
Overall pretty bullish on biotech, less so on pharma.
Peter |
