Ah, geze. Can't we cover a couple of companies, in depth, that have already been mentioned? Slave driver. ;-)
PDLI was built on the vision of Lawrence Korn from Stanford and Cary Queen from NIH. Bright guys. Roche has been a great partner. Roche, Genentech, PDLI and Idec seem to have an incestuous relationship.
The remaining scientific brain trust is also first class, if a bit arrogant.
PDLI mastered true humanization of antibodies. In the U.S., one need go through them if you want to market a humanized monoclonal. The Techniclone contributors sound like they know more about Europe than I do, and Cambridge Antibody and Winter have already been mentioned.
Competitors for humanization are are Medarex, having purchased GenPharm, and CEGE. Both claim success with producing human antibodies in transgenic mice. CEGE recently had to license production technolgy from yeast, however, so all is not well. I don't believe that the process described by ImmunoGen will work.
Anti-IL-2R (Tac) didn't work all that great, IMO, for kidney transplantation. PDLI also picked some other bum projects like anti-CMV. I don't follow them closely enough to know what else they're doing, so these comments certainly don't do justice on the plus side.
IMO, anti-CD40 ligand will soon start to draw attention, and people will realize that Biogen is going to waltz in and make anti-IL-2R look like child's play. At that time, investors will become concerned about future revenue flows, and PDLI will, IMO, hit hard times. However, the license fees and royalties will flow freely, and they're too bright not to be in the thick of things.
So, the major competitor for anti-Tac is *Biogen* with composition of matter for anti-CD40L. BMY, Schering Plough, Immunex, and Genetics Institute are all active here, and Immunex, as usual, has a soluble receptor. I believe that Immunex also has an anti-CD40L license for Europe from Biogen, but I don't know the specifics yet. At least one other company has an ace in the hole. The market is mind boggling (see abstracts uploaded to the Biogen thread), and includes virtually all of autoimmunity and transplantation. You can also perhaps throw in Burkitt's. I already pointed at the PNAS paper by Kirk et al. in an earlier post in this thread. The results (kidney allotransplants in monkeys) are simply mind-boggling. I never thought that the rodent results could be translated to humans, but I'm now convinced of it.
Ortho, Vertex, Sandoz and SangStat could also be considered to be competitors. I know you want details rather than lists of companies, but this would require volumes....... simply can't be done without devoting a bit of time for several weeks.
Great company! Bad news on the horizon for anti-IL-2R.
Rick |
