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Biotech / Medical : Celera Genomics (CRA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: si2000 who wrote (22)	12/4/1999 8:07:00 AM
From: LWolf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 746

OpenFund evidently added CRA into the fund a few points ago... and here's their rationale: openfund.com PE Corp. - Celera Genomics Group. (CRA) Company Background Celera Genomics is involved in the generation, sale and support of genomic information and related software; the discovery, licensing and validation of proprietary gene products; genetic markers, genetic variability, and related consulting and R&D services. Celera (Celera is a take off on "celerity", meaning speed) was formerly the genomic information operations of Perkin-Elmer (now PE Corporation). It was recently established as a tracking stock by PE Corp., side by side with PE Biosystems, who makes related hardware and supplies. Why We Own It Celera is big idea company. They are trying to sequence the human genome, the order of the three billion units of DNA that encode the operating instruction of the human cell. Sequencing the human genome has the potential to revolutionize biology and medicine by allowing all human physiology to be explained in terms of the underlying genes. Sequencing, or mapping, the genetic code promises to open up new possibilities for understanding and treating such ailments as cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer's disease. Celera's big competition in this 'to the moon' endeavor? The US Government. Get the meaning of the name now? The race is on! (More on that below). Celera's efforts are directed at creating high-resolution genetic maps. The company's CEO, Craig Venter, likens its efforts to going beyond "knowing whether you are in Paris or Geneva" to knowing "every single address, every street, every apartment, and the information on every person that lives in every room." Celera expects to complete the sequencing of the human genome by the end of 2001. Once completed, it will offer the information itself as a product through licensing arrangements, as well as services such as genomic information management and analysis software, discovery of gene products, and consulting and contract R&D. Celera's primary customers are expected to be pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Celera has already started signing up customers. It has four deals with large pharmaceutical and agricultural companies: In exchange for fees of several million dollars a year, the companies get broad access to Celera's database. Celera's Technique & Technology Celera uses a fast technique, called the "shotgun" approach, that shreds all of an organism's genetic material into tiny pieces, analyzes them and then tries to assemble the resulting bits of information into a seamless whole. The method is controversial because it presents researchers with mammoth computer analysis: performing quadrillions of calculations to fit all the little pieces together. The technique has never been proven to work on something as large as the genome of a human being, which has an estimated 3.5 billion discrete units of information. Gene-reading machines can typically handle only a few hundred units of information at a time. Celera's computer experts, many of whom come from the arcane field of computational biology, are working to perfect computer routines that can perform the necessary calculations. To accomplish this Herculean task, the company has built a state of the art facility. It has installed nearly 300 super-fast new gene analyzers, making Celera three times larger than any other gene-sequencing lab in the world. The computer cluster Celera is installing will be one of the world's most powerful, comparable to the machines that model nuclear explosions or global climate patterns for the US Government. Celera's shotgun technique is paying dividends. The company recently announced that it had sequenced over 1 billion gene base pairs, or letters of genetic code, out of an estimated 3 billion. Its discoveries include several thousand new receptors, ion channels, and secreted proteins that the company believes will be of significant interest to pharmaceutical companies. It has filed patent applications on 6,500 of the discoveries and intends to license all gene patents "to make intellectual property broadly available." Celera's sequencing method is in contrast to the approach of the rival Human Genome Project, a federally sponsored consortium. The Human Genome Project uses a fairly conventional and time-consuming mapping stage at the front end of the project. Essentially, the consortium bites off small fragments from known positions in the genome and decodes them one by one, like nibbling on a celery stalk. (Celera is tackling the whole genome all at once and assembling all the pieces in one gigantic jigsaw puzzle). The Human Genome Project began in 1990 with no obvious competition. Many considered the task to be such classic 'big science', that as with space flight and nuclear physics, little would emerge. But then Celera appeared, and what had been a painstaking academic task suddenly has become a race to the finish line. Even as they criticized Celera's proposal as dubious, the researchers at the Human Genome Project accelerated their own timetable and promised a "rough draft" gene map by the spring of 2000 and a final map by 2003, instead of the originally planned 2005. An Open Business Model Celera's goal, according to CEO Venter, is to provide information "first to pharmaceutical companies and universities, then to physicians and individuals on a very broad scale." Celera has developed an Internet-based business model and delivery strategy that will allow it to grow profitably while offering the entire biomedical and agricultural research community access to the primary human DNA sequence. Celera will derive revenues primarily through subscription fees from database customers. Those customers will retain the rights to any discoveries made using Celera databases. This policy is intended to promote use of Celera's information by a wide variety of users and distinguish Celera from other companies that seek to retain intellectual property rights to any discoveries made by customers, solely by analyzing the database. Celera is going to do for genetics what the Lexis database service has done for legal information. Like legal information, they want the raw data to be free. They're going to make money by helping companies make sense out of it. It's a strategy that's at once philanthropic and capitalistic; a rare combination.