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Biotech / Medical : T/FIF, a New Plateau -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (340)	11/16/2000 12:28:31 PM
From: scaram(o)uche	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2243

pointer from Jim Oravetz.... businessweek.com NOVEMBER 16, 2000 NEWS ANALYSIS A Big Shift for a Biotech Fund Star Franklin Templeton's Kurt von Emster is quitting the mutual-fund business to try his hand at venture capital and hedge funds Kurt von Emster, the boy wonder of biotechnology mutual-fund investing, has decided to leave Franklin Templeton ( BEN ) to join a private equity group specializing in venture capital and hedge-fund investing in the life-sciences industry. Von Emster, who has been running the $1.6 billion Franklin Biotechnology Discovery Fund and co-managed Franklin's $220 million Global Health Care Fund, becomes the latest high-profile fund manager to leave the retail world for the greener pastures of hedge funds and private equity financing. "This is a great opportunity to create a new fund," says von Emster. "The job will give me more direct control, but I plan to do the same kind of investing," he told Business Week Online on Nov. 15. Von Emster is regarded as one of the first money managers to cash in on the genomics revolution. The rest of the world finally caught on this year as investor fascination with the pioneering research on DNA mapping vastly inflated the market value of hundreds of biotech stocks. Von Emster's Biotechnology Discovery fund closed to investors in September, 2000, after posting a three-year cumulative return of 240%. The fund has posted a year-to-date return of 67%, while the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index is up only 32%. WIDE FOLLOWING. Von Emster plans to create a hedge fund at MPM Capital, a San Francisco venture-capital firm that has invested seed capital into dozens of biotech startups, including enzyme researcher BioMarin Pharmaceuticals ( BMRN ) and Caliper Technologies ( CALP ), a maker of tools for gene analysis. Caliper received $72 million in financing from MPM. Competing biotech fund managers acknowledge von Emster's wide following in the industry. He had become a sort of Jeff Vinik of retail biotech investing. Vinik was the stellar manager of the world's largest mutual fund, Fidelity's Magellan, before he departed in 1996 to start a hedge fund. Last month, Vinik decided to cash out outside investors following a tremendously profitable four-year run in which the fund grew to more than $4 billion in assets. When Vinik left Magellan, many investors feared that the fund had lost its talent base. "I hope that Franklin handles the transition carefully to prevent large redemptions from investors who were banking on [von Emster's] experience when they decided to invest with Franklin," says Dr. Camilo Martinez of the Dresdner RCM Biotechnology Fund. Franklin spokeswoman Lisa Gallegos says a strong lineup of fund managers remains in place to fill von Emster's shoes. Evan McCulloch, who manages the Health Care Fund, will pick up the slack, along with several other assistant managers. Given the volatility biotech stocks are likely to face, von Emster's replacements may wish they had someone else's shoes to wear. By David Shook in New York Edited by Beth Belton