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

To: quidditch who wrote (5361)	1/8/2002 1:06:08 PM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

quid, could even lead to consolidation between these apparently diverse industries I really don't believe we're going to see anything like this, at least in the next decade. In understanding the relationship between these two industries, it's worth separating two quite different aspects. First there is the data management side - dealing with pre-clinical and clinical data across the enterprise. This is expensive to do well, but ultimately boring from our perspective. Second there is the "biology as an information science" aspect. There's a clear push towards trying to perform biology in silico rather than in vitro. As we get a better and better understanding of fundamental biological processes, so software simulations of them will grow in power and predictive capacity. But there are still huge fundamental obstacles to being able to do this effectively. As you move from genomics to the clinic the impact of bioinformatics on the drug development process declines. There are some inroads fairly far downstream - e.g., ARQL tries to use in silico processes in its combichem to address the ADMET issues that so often end up killing a drug candidate, and companies like VRTX have extensive computer-based drug design capabilities. There's really not much commonality between the different programs used by BT. Programs to analyze microarray outputs have nothing in common with programs to do structure based drug design. So bottom line for me is that bioinformatics is always going to be one tool (really many independent tools) in a much bigger picture. Given that, consolidations across the industry boundary don't make sense to me. Peter

To: quidditch who wrote (5361)	1/13/2002 2:37:08 PM
From: smh	Respond to of 52153

No mention of the following Signals article in recent posts discussing bioinformatics. I, and perhaps others, missed it. Typical heavy duty analysis. signalsmag.com concluding paragraphs... <In the final analysis, most observers agree that the daunting challenges facing the bioinformatics sector today are dwarfed by the even more impressive opportunities. Though it remains a relatively small part of the larger biotechnology industry, IBM's Derouault said it would be a mistake to underestimate the bioinformatics sector. "It is growing the fastest," she said. "It has a lot of influence." InterWest Partners' Ehrlich believes the evolutionary process has only just begun. He expects to see companies discarding technologies that address only one part of the data glut in favor of those with the potential to tackle a whole range of drug discovery and development problems. More and more drug research will be conducted in silico. But Lion's Potenzone does not believe there will ever be a magic box that sucks the data cloud in on one side and spits out new drugs from the other. Even Derouault acknowledged that bioinformatics is about a lot more than bringing brute computer power to bear on the problems of drug discovery. In the end, the scientists are still the ones discovering new drugs. "Ultimately, the problem is not an IT problem," Potenzone said. "It's a science problem."> SMH