A bit of Millenium; I just happen to have a copy of their 96 Annual Report with me. If this sounds interesting enough to anyone, I am sure "edgar" will be happy to answer more questions.
First off, and for a recent broad-strokes view of the genomics field, one can start with the Feb 7 issue of Science and its series of articles "Betting on the genome." INCY, HGSI, MLNM, SQNA, GENXY, GENE, AFFX, among others, are profiled and described in general. They put MLNM with SQNA and GENE as practitioners of positional cloning.
MLNM went public last year and collected $60 mill in their IPO. As of Dec 96, they still had over $60 million in cash and other securities and 22 mill shares outstanding (this was increased by about 5 million shares after their purchase of ChemGenics in February), so market cap is close to $450 mill.
MLNM has announced deals with Roche (obesity and type II diabetes), Pfizer (fungal diseases), Lilly (artherosclerosis, oncology, and more recently in helping set up MLNM "BioTherapeutics" biz.yahoo.com ), Astra (respiratory inflammation), AHP (central nervous system and bacterial diseases). These deals add up to almost $300 million (if all milestones are met, but not including potential royalties); this does not include the most recent Lilly deal nor the MIT-AFFX-BMY deal.
As Rocketman mentioned elsewhere, upper business management comes out of the Mayfield Fund (Mark Levin is CEO and Grant Hedrick remains on the board of directors); also in the board is MIT's genomics guru Eric Lander.
MLNM's science is absolutely first class; and their scientists publish with some frequency in Science, Cell, Nature, PNAS, etc. See biz.yahoo.com for a very intriguing (meaning where is the money tomorrow?) recent example. Some of these papers deal with important gene discoveries, for which Roche et al have paid them handsomely -- not purely academic, in other words. In fact they have been criticized (see Science May 30) of doing "science by press release," meaning announcing an important gene discovery without submitting a scientific paper at the same time (they did this last November re. diabetes).
On the negative side (and this may account for their far from stellar stock performance; it's trading at around $16 these days), they may be trying to reach too much. I do not think the Street liked their ChemGenics acquisition very much, and I am not sure how it is digesting the recent announcement of the establishment of their "BioTherapeutics" unit; it was positive initially probably because of Lilly's participation, but this did not lead to a sustainable "breakout" in the stock. Many of us have enjoyed and appreciated Rocketman's insights into INCY's strategy in contrast with those of HGSI and the like; his points may be considered here.
There is more (of course), but I hope this may be enough to get you started.
Max |
