In general, the test kits are a consumable quantity that have to be rebought. The analogy is frequently used that: In the California gold rush the people who really got rich weren't the miner's, it was the companies that sold the picks & shovels. BIOI test kits are the rough equivalent of picks & shovels to the biomedical researchers.
Say you've determined that a certain form of cancer is brought on by a change in a specific protein in the body. To determine how to stop this cancer, your going to have to keep extracting these proteins from an appropriate source (ouch) & isolate what your looking for or find an outside source of this protein to expose to different conditions & stimuli to see how they respond. This is where BIOI comes in. They have a number of these types of substances (i.e. proteins, amino acid, antibodies) that they supply to the research community. They now replicate most in the lab but still have to recover some from various mammals. They have several different types of proteins, antibodies, etc. that they provide.
Another portion of their business is the test kits used to identify the presence & quantity of a material in a lab or medical sample. Say the dreaded XY lipid in a rats blood would indicate that he has some form of disease. BIOI may very well make a test kit which allows you to just add a sample of blood and wait a couple of minutes to get a reading of the XY lipid in the blood, instead of having to have a graduate student looking through a microscope trying to count XY lipids after not sleeping for 20 hours. The test kit may very well be more accurate & less expensive.
Finally, they have also recently introduced kits for actually testing current patients. This would work similar to the above only it would be more of a diagnostic tool than a research tool. I believe that additional liscencing problems (FDA?) exist for these products that aren't required for the above.
They are supposed to have 1300 different products that fit in to the groups above, primarily in the first two.
Sorry if any of the above is hard to follow, I'm not a Biomedical person, & the above is just my understanding and may not be 100% accurate. Good luck to all.
Oh yeah, other companys that might be worth looking is RGFX or XLTC. Also have some other listed in the favorite stocks section of my profile. |
