If anyone trades microcaps here and there I'm betting on DNAP to move from now until March, before the BioMed Conference (Dr. Frudakis involved). I've been watching this stock on L2, seems to have based here, just had a spike few weeks ago in anticipation of this q.. And a newsletter due out this month.. I LOVE THIS PERSONALIZED MEDICINE, LIKE GNSC
FYI, i lurk here and love the info, keep up the awesome works people :)
DNAP Research May Make Personal "Gene Card" Possible
Here's the future scenario: You have a complaint and you've gone to see the MD. You hand him a plastic card, much like a credit card. Call it your "Gene Card." It contains your complete genomic code. Instantly your doctor knows what not to prescribe, as well as what treatment will work best to alleviate your problem.
Something from a sci-fi TV movie? Not at all. DNAPrint genomics, Inc (OTCBB: DNAP) is compiling the database and testing the procedures that will make the "Gene Card" possible - and it could happen very soon.
" But that's the easy part," said Tony Frudakis, PhD, CEO of DNAP. "We have the software to do that right now."
But Dr. Frudakis's goal is a higher one. "I'd like to personalize medicine. I'd like to shake up the pharmaceutical companies. Right now, we have the status quo of 'one size fits all' medicine. We can improve on that," Dr. Frudakis said.
"Take Zocor," he said. "Its sales are, say. $2-billon, because there are side effects that limit the number of patients who can safely use it."
But suppose, he said, it could be determined that only people with a certain genetic marker were subject to the side effect. The drug would have no such detrimental effect on the rest of the population.
"DNAP's product could raise sales from $2-billion to maybe $20-billion for the drug," Dr. Frudakis said. "Now how important is that?"
That's the long range plan. More immediately, DNAP, which has been in business for less than a year, is shooting to have its first intellectual product in the hands of a partner such as Orchid Biosciences, Inc., a preferred bidder, and start revenues flowing by the end of this year.
"After that happens," said Dr. Frudakis, "the income could grow exponentially."
The significance to the pharmaceutical industry could be profound. The DNAP CEO cites the example of Baycol, an anti-cholesterol drug produced by Bayer, which was pulled off the market because its risk/reward ratio was unacceptable. If gene markers can determine which patients would suffer side effects and which would not, such losses won't happen. People who could benefit greatly from a drug won't be denied those benefits because it negatively affects a few.
"That's our business," said Dr. Frudakis. "We have a staff of mostly PhD academic scientists who know what they're doing. We have the resources to develop our products for the market and the partners to that them there."
DNAP stock spiked at $0.14 in May then hit the downslide to 0.04, rebounding slightly to close mid-week at 0.05.
But stock price performance to date doesn't phase Tony Frudakis. "We are the first micro-cap company that I know of, anywhere, to begin to make an impact in the challenging and expensive field of genomics," he said.
"On a budget of about $1 million, a head count of 14 full time employees (10 on and 4 off-site), and a very small market cap of $20 million, we are literally beginning to outrun larger companies in terms of actual results and enabling infrastructure. We are working smarter, building deeper maps, making "master" databanks and building more sophisticated analytical algorithms than companies with budgets 10 times as large as ours," he said.
"These things lead to products, which will lead to revenues and profits," he declared.
"We invested heavily in the infrastructure and expertise needed to perform research of the highest caliber," he wrote in a letter to stockholders. "Having built our foundation, we are now actively engaged in the development of our pipeline of genomics-based patient classification products. Most of our future expenses will be directly related to operating this pipeline."
Dr. Frudakis went on to say: "We continue to write code for the high-throughput and automated mining of complex genetic pattern from our data. When I speak at meetings with executives of other private and publicly held companies, I am continually amazed at how little effort they are putting into genetics IT and discovery. The reason for this is, that it's hard, and hard things tend to get done last. Thus, any company that builds a system to solve genetics problems on a genomics scale is worth its' weight in gold." |
