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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (774)	3/6/2000 5:43:00 PM
From: Pseudo Biologist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

Rick, The description of an EST, IMO, is not the discovery of a human gene I think he will agree with you 100% on that; in fact he uses this argument to diss the INCYs and the CRAs. He claims to have the process in place to (1) get full genes (2) express gene products (3) study the function of such products, all in high-throughput mode. Out of the >120,000 EST-like discoveries he claims that only about 7,500 have gone to enough of the process to deserve a patent application. Just paraphrasing from the interview. Points 1-3 is what HGS has been doing, according to Bill, since 1995. From the interview (my emphasis with x): Haseltine: Anyone who tells you 60,000 is definitely wrong. We have isolated, characterized, and sequenced more than 120,000 different human genes. So the number is certainly greater than 120,000. Those people, who estimate lower, simply don't know. We have isolated and characterized them so we're in a very good position to know that there are more than 120,000 of them. Now the next thing we've done, and this distinguishes us from all other genome companies and projects, is we actually go out and make the product of the gene and determine what it does in living biological systems. We've also learned to robotize and automate those processes. ... . What those genes do that's of medical use. We have now filed patents that describe over 7,500 human genes and their medical uses. David: Let me ask you right there, doctor, when you say there are 120,000 genes and you have patents on 7,500, but you've decoded 95, 96, 97, 98, 99% of it, why is there that numerical disparity? Haseltine: First thing, you can't just patent a discovery. You have to patent something that's useful. The patent, whether it's a machine or whatever it may be, patent law requires three criteria. Your invention must be new or novel, and that's met by the new sequence or new protein. It must be useful, and your patent must teach people how to use it, and it eventually has to be reduced to practice. It isn't enough to see a new sequence to patent it; you have to have some idea of what it does. The patent office is getting tighter and tighter on what it's going to take to get a patent. We realized that for a long time and we realize that in order to get a defensible patent, something you can use to protect a product, you had to do experiments. What distinguishes Human Genome Sciences from the rest of the pack is that we have set up an automated system to make tens of thousands of proteins at once, to test them in live tissues, in living cells, test them in animals, and manufacture them for clinical use. So our patents have a great deal of information in them and there is nobody that's even close. If you take the kind of patents that we've filed, the rest of the world combined has published patents on less than 2,000 human genes. We're already up to 2,700 and we've filed more than 7,500 of those. PB

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (774)	3/6/2000 10:57:00 PM
From: LLCF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

WAY OT: From the wacky 'Contrarian': "My cousin is a chiropractic student in San Jose. Her college is right next to the Cisco campus. She came home yesterday and told me she had taken her tuition money and bought the Palm spin-off. She does not come from a wealthy family. She is 100 percent on loans and grants. "All of her friends are taking their tuition money and doing the same. What is even scarier is that they are also trading penny stocks. Of course some of them are making money and are supposedly paying off their loans. I suspect they are not paying off their loans if they make money. If this isn't bad enough, she also told my mother and I that she and her friends are taking out low interest credit cards and opening trading accounts. Of course they are margining this amount as well. DAK