Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (MLNM) Message Board

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Biotech / Medical : Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (MLNM)

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To: Icebrg who wrote (1506)	5/15/2003 5:05:47 AM
From: Icebrg	Read Replies (1) of 3044

[I picked the following from MF's Millennium board. The guy who has written it is working in biotech research - although on the Ag side, if I got things right. Anyhow he should have a fair idea, I guess. Some interesting thoughts. Erik] "Anyway on to your point. You are dead right of course in saying that MLNM promised their new gleaming shiny spiffy genomics platform would generate more drug targets and get drug to market quicker tahn ever before - thus slashing development costs and making us all rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. And I've got pretty good dreams. You're problem is that Velcade come not from that font of wonder that is the genome but instead from grubby boring mundane (sharp indrawn breath) chemistry. Which indicates smart management and not wonderous new research. The problem with your concern is time. Now in this I think MLNM has been remiss. As an investor reading about MLNM and paying close attention to their press statements over the years you'd have to believe that genomics was going to change the way we do drug development. But what those press statements have been very careful to say nothing about is ... time. Not time as in the amount of time from drug inception to market, boy have they said a lot about that kind of time. No what I mean is how much time will it take to get the engine going? Nobody has said much about that at all. Well nobody but us folks on the board who actually spend our daily lives (such as they are) trying to get technology like this stuff to actually work. I have never believed that MLNM would get their genomics engine running in anything less than 5 years. And to be honest that would be an impressive feat. Not 5 years since MLNM opened it's corporate doors, no nothing that simple. But 5 years of grunt from the time the techniques first came into the labs. So by my best estimates optimistically it wouldn't have been before 1998 that MLNM could have known what techniques they needed for their engine. So at best you'd hope that MLNM might have a functioning genomics platform ready to start pumping by about say - now. It's only by now that their systems would all be working well enough to actually produce a preclinical candidate. Prior to now, what will have been happening is some wierd hybrid of old technology and new. Probably a reasonably productive hybrid, hence the deals they've made. But realistically it's only by now will they confidently be able to generate real preclinical candidates from a genomic platform. In short it's my best guess that MLNM has not been a genomics company before sometime around 2003. Elements of genomics will have been applied to their programs and in some cases they will have helped and in some cases they will have thrown up red herrings. The problem is that it just takes a long time to get everything working right and reliably, so that what you get out is real with any confidence. So what did I expect from MLNM till now. Well I expected pretty much what we've got. Some drugs that were mostly old technology with some help from genomic methods to try and speed their progress through trials. I didn't expect some really astute aquisitions that was just a bonus. So while you are saying "$400 mil a year in R&D and what have we got - sweat fanny adams". I'm saying - "about $2 billion to set up human genomic platforms to develop new drugs, that's about right." Where we'll start aligning in our views is that from here on in I expect to see some new, and I mean really new targets and drugs to start coming into trial stages. My guess on timelines is that this year we should start to see pre-clinical studies. Because I believe MLNM is fast I'd expect some of those pre-clinical drugs to make it into trials by say the end of 2004 and to also see the engine start pumping out more and more pre-clinical candidates by then as well. By 2005 I'd expect to start seeing rapid progress through clinical trials to come into fruition - say two thirds current pace, maybe faster. But don't get me wrong it isn't a perfect vision. The problem with the vision, and a problem that all too few folks are saying out loud is that these new drugs won't be blockbusters. NONE of them will be blockbusters. Not one! The reason is simple. Because these drugs will be developed from a very well understood relationship between patient and drug, each new drug will be targeted to only a fraction of the patients suffering the disease. No more drugs that are applied to 100000 patients per year. Instead drugs that hit 2% of the patient group or 5% or 0.5%. But for each of those small groups the drug will really be a cure. A real cure. Patient by patient. So for me MLNM is just begining."

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