Not yet ready for prime time portfolio:
EPIX
ILMN
IMM
MNTA
I'll make my final entry by Friday afternoon. I will include these four and add six others, dividing the $100k into $10k (or at most $15k) each.
I'm keeping ILMN and IMM from last year but dropping the others to force myself to think about trends and chances.
IMM isn't there yet as a company, but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation likes them. They may never be a "blockbuster" company because they focus on diseases afflicting poor nations where charging high prices is impossible.
I think ILMN's technology will win out over AFFX. The YOY gain may not match last year. The YOY gain may not match last year because "gene profiling" is on the radar now, and Human Genetic Variation is the 2007 BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR according to Science.
sciencemag.org
Two remarks come to mind:
1. Where can I get one of those genetic variation t-shirts?
I like how the cover photo on Science looks like a stylish teen model. (It doesn't resemble me in the slightest, but it's great if it makes the next generation think about science.)
2. What makes genetic variation a "breakthrough" for 2007?
One of the first remarks I heard within days of the Human Genome Project announcement was, "Whose genome are we going to sequence?" Craig Ventner answered that his way, and the publicly funded project is a blend of many donors.
If I recall correctly, the public "gene pool" expanded as more research groups added to the project, but it started with DNA from Amish or Mennonite families, because their genealogy can be traced back hundreds of years with relatively little diversity.
Ironically, Ventner's genome is that of only one person, but reflects the "melting pot" of America better than an Amish genome, since few outsiders choose to adopt their lifestyle and religion.
The "breakthrough" is not the concept of genetic variation, but the fact that technological advances in several areas make it economically feasible to add to and learn from the data. The caveat for investors is that the technology is evolving rapidly, with no clear "winners", and may represent a "picks and shovels" rather than a "blockbuster" approach.
Google's search and correlation expertise combined with their genome partner may be the financial winners, using their know-how and the information freely, if inadvertently or unknowingly donated by millions of users, to provide data to sell on drug target leads and targeted patient population.
New sequencing technology makes it economically feasible to sequence thousands of genetic variations, SNP maps are yielding results, and faster and better computers and software (informatics) make it possible to handle and analyze the data.
sciencemag.org
"Techniques that scan for hundreds of thousands of genetic differences at once are linking particular variations to particular traits and diseases in ways not possible before. Efforts to catalog and assess the effects of insertions and deletions in our DNA are showing that these changes are more common than expected and play important roles in how our genomes work--or don't work."
"...There are an estimated 15 million places along our genomes where one base can differ from one person or population to the next. By mid-2007, more than 3 million such locations, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), had been charted. Called the HapMap, this catalog has made the use of SNPs to track down genes involved in complex diseases--so-called genome-wide association studies--a reality." |
