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Biotech / Medical : VD's Model Portfolio & Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rocketman who wrote (4263)	3/8/1998 1:01:00 AM
From: John Zwiener	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9719

Rocket, I'm not sure I mentioned here before. When this thread was formed, it seemed like a close knit group and I didn't want to impose. As for what Igen does now in the short term? Not sure. There is an estimated 17 million shares (including my estimate of the shares from a private placement--it was oversubscribed). Insiders own 43% of the stock (or somewhere around that). I also think the 1.5 to 1.8 million shares in the private placement are locked up for a while. So that leaves a float of 9 million shares. From prior activity of price and volume, I thought we would have topped out at 22, but I was wrong. It seems someone is buying very heavily. There are a number of rumors surrounding Igen, all good. I don't have a price target, but $40 is what I have is minimum worth based on the Boehringer/Roche electsys immunoassay instrument (Origen technology licensed from Igen for 50 million and 9% of revenues). They are placing these at over 1,000 instruments per quarter in hospitals and labs. BMG/Roche is said to be coming out with a high thru-put soon. In a year, a double or quadruple in price would not surprise me. In several years, I have tentatively guessed at $200 or more, but that assumes that electsys placements get to close to 20,000 placements. I think that's possible. I have assumed that half of free cash flow will be reinvested and half may counted as profit, so my estimates at Share price may be off. But things the CEO and other officers have said, indicate they are oriented towards profit (maybe because of all the shares they own). I'm not counting the high thru put instrument of Igen's in the deal with Pfizer. If this works out, then eventually this will be placed with other pharmaceutical companies, I believe that these other deals are in the works Also the residual DNA test for biotech drugs. The rumored possibily big POC deal (this has about 3 areas that may end up as several deals) Basic research in universities. Plus deals with Easai, Organon Technica, and I forget right now, are beginning to show some promise(when reading about the OT NASBA system, you could get the impression that revenues here are dropping, but early on, Igen manufactured the test for them and sold it at cost back to OT. The declining revenue is from OT taking over the manufacturing--this doesn't affect Igen because they made no profit from it). Finally, there is a dispute that BMG is not paying 9%, but instead around 3 to 4%. With the Roche buyout of BMG, it's possible that this dispute can be resolved with the new owners. If it can't, then Igen has an extremely strong case. In my opinion, it looks like BMG was unequivically violating many parts of their license. Despite this problem, Igen is still doing very well and has plenty of money in the bank. There's more, but it's still not far enough along for me to consider it (but I've said that before with this company). In all, as long as they continue the rapid progress which at times catches me off guard, this company is worth considering for the longterm in my opinion. (by the way, they could do half the rate of electsys placements and still be doing as well as anyone has before).