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

To: A.J. Mullen who wrote (8316)	5/9/2003 1:12:02 PM
From: Biomaven	Respond to of 52153

reduction in the cost of research We just haven't seen this yet, although it is perhaps too early to tell. Sure screens are easier, but to the extent that companies are attacking new pathways with less well-studied biology, you are going to see more failures. To date I'd say the difficulties inherent in attacking new pathways and multifactorial diseases has outweighed any new efficiencies in research. Look at antibody drug development, where the problem has not been the inability to come up with a good antibodies but rather the problem that the targets they have picked just haven't panned out. (Look at PDLI yesterday with its anti-IL4 antibody). I have to assume that a small molecule that hit the same pathway would also have flamed out. So right now it seems to me that the bottleneck is biology rather than screening. We have (in some limited sense) the individual genes, but we simply don't understand how they all interact in a disease process. Not that all is bleak. A good example might be that kinase study in colorectal ca that I just referenced. Seems to me like a fair chance you might eventually get a bunch of gleevec-like drugs out of that study. The practical impact of a dozen gleevec-like drugs might be pretty substantial. The only people who probably have a good handle at this point how much impact modern screening and ADMET techniques are having on the drug development process are some big pharma like Pfizer. The rest of us are going to have to wait a few years to find out. Peter