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Biotech / Medical : Ciphergen Biosystems(CIPH): -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nigel bates who wrote (219)	4/19/2004 4:38:53 PM
From: tuck	Respond to of 510

>>The FDA/NCI admits on its Web site that the original Ciphergen systems have "too low mass resolution and too high mass drift for our specific needs. We could not run the same sample on the same machine at a later date and have the spectra align correctly."5 Ciphergen's CEO concedes the point as well: "I think they're really good research machines at this point, but they're not at a stage where they're going to be robust enough to be put into a diagnostic setting easily," says Rich. He adds that the next generation of systems, due out around the end of the year, "will really be robust enough to be used in a reference laboratory setting and in an esoteric testing setting." << Ciphergen has recently upgraded the analysis software, too: >>FREMONT, Calif., April 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ciphergen Biosystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CIPH - News), in conjunction with Salford Systems, announced today the release of Biomarker Patterns(TM) Software 5.0, Ciphergen's latest advanced offering for elucidation of clinically relevant protein patterns. Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to Ciphergen, directed to finding protein patterns in mass spectrometry data using the classification and regression tree algorithm to identify diagnostic patterns of proteins derived from any type of mass spectrometry data. This method is used in Ciphergen's SELDI ProteinChip® Biomarker System for biomarker discovery, validation and assay development. "Biomarker Patterns Software is the only commercially available clinical proteomics software that addresses both discovery of protein multi-markers and their translation to assays with high predictive accuracy," commented Martin Verhoef, President of Ciphergen's Biosystems Division. "This sets Ciphergen's proteomics platform apart from groups that are using other pattern recognition methods without protein ID and from groups cataloging protein ID's for literature validation in order to guess which protein will make a good assay, a classical approach which has had limited success in developing in vitro diagnostic tests over the past decades." Biomarker Patterns Software is a unique, Windows-based package for supervised classification of SELDI (Surface-Enhanced Laser Desorption/Ionization) mass spectral data sets derived from the Ciphergen ProteinChip® platform. Ciphergen Biosystems and Salford Systems collaborated to create BPS by modifying and enhancing Salford's existing CART® technology. Salford's expertise in the Classification and Regression Tree procedure, introduced by Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Richard Olshen and Charles Stone in 1984, is well-established. Ciphergen has exclusive rights to this software in the field of proteomics. A major new component of Biomarker Patterns Software 5.0 allows intelligent feature selection using functionality from Salford's TreeNet algorithm, which embodies Jerome Friedman's MART (Multiple Additive Regression Trees). The methodology is based on CART, but with adaptations designed to extract the most reliable information from the data set. TreeNet builds a large number of small trees, each designed to help correct the errors of its predecessors. This new feature avoids the potential problem of "overfitted data," a condition that occurs when many data points are analyzed against a relatively small sample set, a situation frequently encountered in the early phases of a discovery project, when a relatively small number of samples may be available. By allowing a more focused analysis on the variables that really matter, there is a notable payoff from pre-selecting variables. "Biomarker Patterns Software 5.0 incorporates a major analytical advance in which a boosting algorithm such as TreeNet is used to identify the proteins that are relevant to a particular disease and then CART is used to summarize and display the results in a clear, concise, and scientifically comprehensible manner," stated Dan Steinberg, President and CEO of Salford Systems. "This is the first time these technologies have been combined in this way and putting such a powerful but easy to use software tool in the hands of a large universe of clinical researchers and biologists holds the potential to discover and create break-through, multi-biomarker diagnostic assays."<< Although there are hints that this quarter will be better than previous ones, I think it is possible we will get a better entry later this year. I suspect prospective buyers might wait for the second generation systems, if they're as big an improvement as Rich says. Thus I expect systems sales to be flat until then. I still have my eye on CIPH, but don't own any. Waiting for negative reaction to earnings weakness based on slow sales of current systems for my next buy. Cheers, Tuck