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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spekulatius who wrote (87535)	12/25/2000 11:37:18 AM
From: Spekulatius	Respond to of 132070

To all: Biotech stocks II - INCY & PRCS INCY 24$, 1,54B$ market cap Celera (CRA) has been in the headlines recently when announcing the sequencing of the Human Genome, while INCY has been laboring quietly. INCY was the first company offering a gene database to drug companies and today 19 out of the 20 largest drug companies subscribe the INCY database. INCY continues to improve its toolkit by adding proteomics (with Oxford Glycoscience), gene clones and adding an online version of their database with web access. Recently INCY added Sumitomo and Sankyo to their subscriber list. Even with fierce competition from CRA, new money continues to flow to INCY; upcoming biotechs like Biogen and Vertex choose INCY. Besides the subscription revenue, INCY will receive milestone payments and a small royalties (1-2%) if a drug developed with INCY data advances.Currently, INCY users have taken 30.000 licenses, each representing a possible drug developed with INCY data. Thus a significant part of the worlds drug pipeline will be developed with INCY data, this could add up to huge royalty numbers. Besides, INCY vast patent estate represents a further wildcard. While the value of gene patents is unknown, the royalties mentioned above are based on contracts, not on patents and won't be affected by patent quarrels. INCY has close to 700M$ in cash, representing more than 40% of the market cap. PRCS 26 3/4$m 1,1B$ market cap Praecis (PRCS) had an IPO at 10$/share in April but this does not mean that the stock is expensive. Praecis has recently filed a NDA for Abarelix, a drug against prostate cancer,partnered with AMGN in the US and Sanofi worldwide. The clinical data for Abarelix looks very good and the drug has a blockbuster potential. PRCS management has negotiated the partnerships from a strong position apparently: AMGN has paid the first 175M$ of Abarelix development costs (the remainder will be split 50/50 with PRCS) and has granted PRCS a 150M$ credit line. Together with cash at hand PRCS has 300M$ of funding available. In addition to prostate cancer, Abarelix will be developed for other indications (women's health) PRCS pipeline excluding Abarelix looks very strong: biz.yahoo.com PRCS uses its proprietary LEAP technology to develop its drugs. PRCS claims that LEAP significantly improves the productivity of drug development. If Abarelix is successful, this will catapult PRCS into the tier one range of Biotech companies with a market cap of 5-10B$.