New imaging agent for Alzheimers licensed to Amersham/GE.
Last evening earnings came out at $.23 and revenues at $12.1mm followed by much complaining about how much management should be telling analysts and us. I found the results predictable if a bit on the low side and worked out some numbers which suggest about 300,000 procedures were done during the quarter in the US, half with Cypher and half otherwise. JNJ said 76 percent of all stent money was spent on Cyphers and that cypher dollar (could be units) sales had increased 10% quarter over quarter. At any rate, it looks to me like SRDX is gaining about a penny per share after taxes for each 10,000 cyphers JNJ sells and I expect they will sell an additional $50mm in our second quarter to Mar. 31 bringing their total world unit sales to about 200,000 stent sales in the US vs about 180,000 in the first quarter.
I should go back and read the responses to my posts on those numbers on Yahoo in the middle of last night to see if someone picked up some glaring mistakes--have not done it yet.
My numbers are not solid and depend upon how accurate JNJ's estimates were, but they give me a feel for the total numbers of units and procedures being done each quarter. Sales in ROW seem to run about 40,000 stents a quarter when I guess that JNJ gets an average of $2000 per stent overseas, but that is just a guess. They had $80mm of ROW sales last quarter and that was up significantly but mostly due to currency weakness of the dollar.
"Reuters
New imaging agent could help diagnose Alzheimer's
Wednesday January 21, 5:51 pm ET
WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (Reuters) - A new imaging agent that homes in on the gummy plaque believed to destroy the brains of Alzheimer's patients may finally allow the disease to be diagnosed before it kills, researchers said on Wednesday.
The agent, a radioactive dye called Pittsburgh Compound B, can also be used to test new drugs being developed to fight Alzheimer's, which affects an estimated 4 million Americans, the researchers said.
The hallmark of Alzheimer's is the buildup of protein clogs called amyloid beta. These eventually destroy the brain, robbing patients of their memory and eventually their ability to care for themselves. There is no cure for the disease.
Using the new agent, "we will likely be able to follow the progression of the disease and speed the development of promising new therapies aimed at halting the build-up of amyloid in the brain," Dr. William Klunk of the University of Pittsburgh, who led the study, said in a statement.
Writing in the Annals of Neurology, Klunk and colleagues said the imaging agent allowed the use of positron emission tomography, or PET, to view the plaque in the brains of 16 Alzheimer's patients. They also used the method on nine healthy volunteers.
"We will not only find out when plaques begin to form, we will be able to see directly if a medication is preventing or reversing plaque formation over the long term," Klunk said.
The Alzheimer's Association, which helped fund the study, said it was an important step forward.
"We now have a tool to detect one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease in the brains of living patients. Until now, this could only be shown at autopsy or by brain biopsy," said the Association's William Theis.
Chet Mathis, a chemist and professor of radiology who worked on the study, said the imaging compound uses a dye that homes in on plaque, attached to a radioactive carbon "tag."
The dye, an adjusted version of the dye used by pathologists to find Alzheimer's in brain samples from dead patients, is harmless, Mathis said. "In two hours it is gone from the body," he said in a telephone interview.
He said the compound, patented by the university, had been licensed to Amersham (London:AHM.L - News), a British healthcare firm that makes imaging agents. General Electric (NYSE:GE - News) is about to take over Amersham." |
