Phillip, Baird, et al.
This is a VERY interesting co! And the Warner Lambert deal today should be a screaming buy signal..
After the hype, and then the deflation of stocks like Arqule and Tripos early this year, I'm reluctant to bite on another high- throughput screening co -- but after looking into ABSC a little, I'm sharpening my canines (bought a little yesterday at 13 1/2).
I've looked at some of R Tsien's papers on the jellyfish green protein and appliications, and I think this guy is a genius. The Green Protein fluoresces by itself, just amino acids, without benefit of the typical hydrophobic fluorophore. So it can be spliced to other proteins or co- expressed with a marker gene, and used to light up cells based on their lineage or gene expression. But, with combinations of other fl. molecules (not necessarily protein), it can also be used to detect shifts in ions, membrane potential, binding to a receptor, or almost anything you care to target. The green protein has also been modified genetically so that different mutants fluoresce at different wavelengths and assay builders have several "colors" to work with (I used to work in this area a little).
Tsien & colaborators have found ways to get these naturally fl. proteins to report on membrane potential, Ca++ flux, ion channels, etc. Now the chem. combinatorics companies, like Arqule, will have biologically RELEVANT assays to run their millions of compounds against (Arqule and Allanex are collaborators).
The science is sound and so is the business plan... my guess is ABSC will be profitable next year. The genomics revolution wont have any impact on the drug business unless there are better assays to allow really fast assays against the new targets. These assays of Tsien's are able to report on metabolically interesting events like ion shifts (relevant to cardio and blood pressure drugs, for instance) -- and without perturbing the cell in unnatural ways.
I confess I dont know the people who are running the co, but they are making the right moves. Brought public by A Brown and H&Q... INCY CEO Roy W is on the board. Deals with instrumentation cos for slick miniaturization and robotics schemes....
It may take Wall Street a while to figure out how important this technology is, but I think we have a mini-AFFX or INCY on our hands. Look for upgrades from other brokerages soon. |
