Lehman review of SCIENCE article from early May by PTO head regarding patenting of ESTs. This really sounds great for INCY and HGSI. Got this from someone on Yahoo, but the link given didn't work right, so I had to figure it out. Not sure if these links work right, if not, Go the Lehman site, click on Equity Research, click on research, click on biotechnology, and then pick out the article from the list. You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the article:
lehman.com
lehman.com
This sounds even better than I had hoped! Sounds like they are willing to give EST owners a stake on the full genes, WOW!!! I figured they might allow engineering around them by changing them as little as a base pair (maybe this is considered too obvious). INCY has had to have filed for hundreds of thousand, if not millions of ESTs. Back in 92-93, they were shipping them off to the PTO in lots of 5000, and that was before they ramped up many many fold. One thing I recall hearing about the NIH patents that were abandoned was that they didn't claim utility. INCY claims if I recall correctly, as was stated in the article, that the ESTs are useful in finding the full length gene, for gene identification and also for medical diagnostic purposes, amongst other possibilities. The whole patenting of EST issues I believe has not been valued into the share price of these companies, as this will give them huge power over a vast array of DNA.
Rman |
