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Biotech / Medical : Biotime-Nasdaq's best kept secret? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Roof who wrote (809)	4/1/1998 12:28:00 PM
From: Stephen How	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1432

I have no estimate of the sales figures. I would need to know the total hetastarch sales of last year before I would even guess. The problem is that nobody has a clue as to what these actual figures are. Some say 200M and others say 25M. Do you have accurate data on this? I had an idea for estimating these numbers. I saw a web-article that recorded Canadian pentastarch usage since 1992. If it is true that Canada uses pentastarch as it's exclusive starch-based expander, then we might proportionally estimate a good annual figure for U.S. starch expander use. (Canada's numbers might be higher, since they use pentastarch as an albumin replacement. However, they prolly have less gunshot wounds :)) I'll look into this estimate later. I refer to Puck on the fast-track approval likelihood. Steve

To: Jim Roof who wrote (809)	4/2/1998 5:40:00 AM
From: Stephen How	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1432

An estimate of annual U.S. starch-based plasma expander usage based on Canadian Pentastarch usage If it's true that Canada uses pentastarch as it's exclusive starch-based plasma expander, we should be able to extrapolate the annual U.S. starch + albumin usage from their data. (I guess the Canadian numbers are available because of their centralized Red Cross blood banking.) I found an estimate of the 1994 Canadian pentastarch usage at 360,000 units/year = 180,000 liters/year. (http://doyle.ibme.utoronto.ca/anesthesia/Penta4.HTM) Scaling this usage by the U.S./Canadian population ratio of 250M/30M, we get a rough estimate of U.S. starch-based expander usage =~ 1.5M liters/year Using the price of Hespan from $36 - $60 per liter, as gleaned from the S.F. Chronicle (Herb Greenberg 10/9/97): -- Point of order: An item here earlier this week regarding Berkeley-based Biotime said that a blood-volume expander sold by rival DuPont costs between $20 and $50 per liter; make that $36 to $60. A DuPont spokesman says most hospitals have contracts to buy the product at the very low end of the range. we get an annual U.S. market of $54M - $90M /year. YMMV, Steve btim.dyn.ml.org