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

To: Elmer who wrote (5163)	12/17/2001 9:38:17 AM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

David, It's been clear for a few years now that big pharma are going to have an increasingly hard time maintaining growth in the face of patent expirations. This is good for biotech in that it makes their pipeline that much more valuable, but bad in that when pharma struggle some of their weakness tends to rub off onto biotech. A serious challenge for all is the diminishing returns on investment dollars. Pharma research budgets have been rising sharply, while the number of NCE's the pharma get approved each year has if anything been dropping. The hope is that eventually genomics-based research; smarter in silico ADMET screening and drug design and the impact of pharmacogenomics in allowing much smaller trials will eventually bring down the cost of a new drug. When comparing biotechs and pharmas, one interesting difference is that patent expirations pose a much smaller threat to biologicals than they do to small molecule drugs. Monoclonal antibodies also seem to show a smaller attrition rate through the drug approval phases than do small molecule drugs. Peter