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Biotech / Medical : Biotime-Nasdaq's best kept secret?
BTIM 0.00010000.0%Nov 5 1:26 PM EST
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To: Jim Roof who wrote (809)4/2/1998 5:40:00 AM
From: Stephen How  Read Replies (1) of 1432
 
An estimate of annual U.S. starch-based plasma expander usage based on Canadian Pentastarch usage

If it's true that Canada uses pentastarch as it's exclusive starch-based plasma expander, we should be able to extrapolate the annual U.S. starch + albumin usage from their data. (I guess the Canadian numbers are available because of their centralized Red Cross blood banking.)

I found an estimate of the 1994 Canadian pentastarch usage at 360,000 units/year = 180,000 liters/year.

(http://doyle.ibme.utoronto.ca/anesthesia/Penta4.HTM)

Scaling this usage by the U.S./Canadian population ratio of 250M/30M, we get a rough estimate of

U.S. starch-based expander usage =~ 1.5M liters/year

Using the price of Hespan from $36 - $60 per liter, as gleaned from the S.F. Chronicle (Herb Greenberg 10/9/97):

-- Point of order: An item here earlier this week regarding Berkeley-based Biotime said that a blood-volume expander sold by rival DuPont costs between $20 and $50 per liter; make that $36 to $60. A DuPont spokesman says most hospitals have contracts to buy the product at the very low end of the range.


we get an annual U.S. market of $54M - $90M /year.

YMMV,
Steve

btim.dyn.ml.org
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