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

To: Bluegreen who wrote (531)	7/11/2000 11:18:21 AM
From: StockDoc	Respond to of 642

Brief answer: I just speculate, Bluegreen, as an ordinary LLY investor. I bought LLY "low" and sold "high". If you're really interested in how I speculate, read the following. I SPECULATE that if rhAPC treatment (costing $10k ? per patient) drops mortality rate from 30% to 15% (?) (a 50% reduction) in severe sepsis (up to 50,000 cases per year in the U.S., killing 2/5, 23,000 people, of them), then rhAPC will be the treatment of choice in this particular patient population (<5% of all sepsis cases, more than 1 million per year in the U.S.). Moreover, not ALL of the remaining 15% dies from sepsis. I continue to speculate that about 10% dies from underlying disease conditions (cancer, injuries, metabolic failure, etc.) not affected by anti-sepsis measures (rhAPC, antibiotics, etc.). This would leave 5% of the patients to be improved upon, say drop mortality from 15% to 10%. If BPI+rhAPC is 40% better than rhAPC alone (the combo dropping mortality from 15% to 13%), LLY + XOMA would have to team up big time and demonstrate the improvement in a gigantic clinical trial. Completion of such a study could take many many years because they'd have to screen and exclude a lot of patients who are unlikely to benefit in terms of mortality and thus would jeopardize primary trial end points. Since we have no info on what patient population would respond best to BPI+rhAPC, this strategy could lead to failure. Nevertheless, if a trial started now and they'd be lucky to pick the right patient subpopulation that responds, FDA approval could be in place before 2005. Assuming a 50% market takeover within a year from rhAPC alone and no other drug entering the market, the combo could eventually start generating income and then even profit. I speculate that BPI cannot survive this long without another bigger market. By the way, meningitis is inclusive of all severe sepsis cases and rhAPC biting into BPIs niche is possible. I'd be interested where and when LLY talked about patent filing on BPI and PC. It's unusual for LLY to do so, they rarely if ever announce filed (or issued) patents as most of their patents (there are thousands) are irrelevant for their business success. I haven't been at the XOMA board in a while (I had Xoma stock for a while). What's the news there, in brief.