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

To: keokalani'nui who wrote (7228)	10/23/2002 10:14:08 PM
From: John Metcalf	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52153

My first reaction was too shocked to include analysis. Only satire and exaggeration were available at the moment. What if (your choice of) printed media could produce clinical evidence that looking at their material produces a measurable difference in PDE5? And so on. But Pfizer doesn't see this as a joke, having sued four companies when they should have been celebrating their patent issuance. It is unthinkable to me that courts will validate Pfizer's claim. It is also naive to think that the unthinkable won't be thunk! The analogy that comes to mind is the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. If there had been (there probably was) a claim that compounds which inhibit reuptake of serotonin could be used in treatment of depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, OCD, etc., a number of important psychotropics would not be available today. Clinicians will tell you that individual response varies between the various SSRI's, and that a range of them is important to treatment. If there had been an enforced patent for inhibition of serotonin reuptake, with license not affordable to other companies, we would never have had even one SSRI, unless it had been developed by the original patent holder who had claimed inhibition of reuptake. Another implication of Pfizer's claim theory relates to biotech research boutiques, some of them gone today. If their patents included all subsequent work on a biological mechanism of action of a class of substances, they may become vampire billionaires. Who was the first to claim MAO inhibition? Who first documented the effect of a statin on cholesterol? What percentage of sales over the years are they entitled to receive for infringement by a multitude of products? A third implication of Pfizer's claim is that research institutions assigned the original work, for very little money, to pharmas/biotechs because they could not reasonably expect that their prior art nor patents would be broadly construed. Therefore, they are owed an amount to make them whole at the valuation of any new construction of their patents. MIT (and other research universities) is gonna be free of tuition! Again: the unthinkable is being thunk at Pfizer. This action may be doing a Viagra on legal brain cells all over the pharma/biotech landscape. I hope Pfizer does not sue me for suggesting that we hold on, and keep up a watch on this litigation.