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

To: Biomaven who wrote (6095)	4/5/2002 1:28:12 AM
From: tuck	Respond to of 52153

Peter & Quid, I have not seen the margins on chips versus equipment versus services broken out for CIPH. For a look at the margins overall, check Message 17063358 Most trickle equipment has gross margins in the 45% to 55% range, while reagents/consumables are closer to 70%. The chips are relatively high margin well plates or slides with interesting chemicals on them, thus falling into the consumables category, IMO. More color on the field of use can be found in the somewhat labored discussion between Peter and myself concerning the LumiCyte litigation from March 7th onward on the CIPH thread. Shades of the IGEN/Roche battle, but with the victor not at all clear, as Peter says. They may both be guilty of selling outside of their field. Also in this post: Message 17071951 Peter might be right about CIPH being able to derive royalties from the tests, but they certainly can't sell tests directly to clinical diagnostics labs or end users in the self test market (if it ever develops, it belongs to LumiCyte). I agree with Peter that the fields CIPH does have are big enough; the comparison with AFFX seems apt. I'm not so sure I agree with Peter that they don't know what the proteins are they've marked. Their biomarker centers have much more sensitive mass spectrometers (TOF/TOFs) for protein sequencing, and I imagine most of their customers have them, too. I can easily see them not yapping about the proteins for competitive reasons. Also, knowing the biomarkers doesn't necessarily help much for drug discovery. They are often well downstream and have only a distant relationship to a druggable pathway. I am proud to say that I dug up the info CIPH just PRed a couple of weeks ago, one of my better research efforts. Not that it helped much; the stock ran up and has given it all back during this time. I have had no position, but am eyeing one closely (these days, so many choices, so little cash). The stock did react somewhat after I posted that it didn't. But at first it just sat there after what I thought was a pretty big announcement. However, the sensitivity and specificity of several of the assays appears substantially less than what they got for ovarian. Perhaps that's the cause for the muted reaction. So my question was, what are the standards? Any armchair oncologists out there? Are those good results for those cancer variants? Even if they're not all great, this is a first cut. Further tries may yield better results, and it's not a very expensive process once the readers have been installed. And I wonder what Miljenko would think of "process proteomics." Anyhow, we should probably move this discussion -- if it is to continue -- back to the CIPH thread. Sorry, Peter. Was just trying to reach some folks with more cancer expertise than were likely to wander to the CIPH thread without some prodding. Cheers, Tuck