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Biotech / Medical : Visible Genetics Inc.(VGIN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richard Haugland who wrote (176)	4/7/1998 10:27:00 PM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 337

Richard's; Who competes with VGINF? This technology that appears to work would seem to have such great potential that there must be others striving to some of the action. There is a small company - Oncometrics - in Canada that is mostly owned by AccuMed that is developing genetic test for early detection of cancer. Maybe they use saliva. Is this a viable possibility or just dreaming? Thanks and good Investing; Steve

To: Richard Haugland who wrote (176)	4/7/1998 10:55:00 PM
From: scaram(o)uche	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 337

Yup, I know MLNM. Was just telling Jim Silverman earlier today that I couldn't resist any longer and loaded up. No, there's no negative news. Of late, biotech is considered a source of funds when blue chips and techs are rallying, and suffers along with everything else when tough days are encountered. The focus of Joe Investor is on products, near-term stuff, not the value of a pipeline or small entrepreneurial business units. Of the biotechs followed by John Metcalf, MLNM is 37th in terms of market cap at today's close. At a market cap of $500 million, it's a target of those who focus on revenue. As you know...... New business unit in the information field (databases, the "InCyte of Proteomics"). Service and products business unit bringing product to market this year. Predictive management (pharmacogenomics and diagnomics) business unit. Chemgenics added to the pharmaceutical business unit, 10 compounds moved into lead development, at least five of which have moved into advanced chemistry. Genes ----> target ------> product. High-throughput genomics platform. Consortium in place with Whitehead, Affymetrix and BMY. Monsanto alliance...... big bucks for five years. Pharma partners...... Lilly, Pfizer, Wyeth-Ayerst, Roche, and Astra. Levin predicts that they will bring 1-2 new chemical entities/year and 1-2 new protein products/year to the market...... 2-4 products per year within the 8-10 year time frame. Biotherapeutics business unit....... the Lilly deal??...... it's a "snowball" business model; MLNM retains rights to a variety of the proteins and to all antisense, small molecules, etc., and they're currently out talking to partners about molecules where Lilly has funded the discovery work. Protein leads in inflammation and osteoporosis, at least 50 molecules into animal studies in 1998, 10 molecules into animal studies last year. New partner predicted for pharmacogenomics this year, new partner predicted for diagnomics this year. Profiling efforts..... transcriptional databases and protein profiling (proteomics). These are bioinformatics efforts that are downstream from existing databases. New hire from EMBL (Sanders) is as good as they get, first product targeted for this year. Minimum of five new strategic alliances predicted for '98. Revenues of over $100 million. Net burn of about $20 million. Over $700 million committed from existing partners, with only about $200 million burned to date. The company is "free". ;-) But!!! First IND? 1999, and that's the bottom line for investors right now...... Joe Investor, for biotech, says "show me the money!". This cycle has occurred before, and the industry is light years out in front this time. Nonetheless, who can blame Joe Investor? He doesn't know that the biotech industry that spawned the high-profile failures is a different beast. He only listens to the latest flapping lips on CNBC, the experts from fund X or bank Z. Do I think there are any weaknesses? I don't know anything about the "profiling" efforts. There are certainly several companies that claim that it can be done, but I can't comment. To me, there's been lots of horn tooting and little data. On the other hand, I have some friends who claim that they're a part of successful efforts in this area. Makes no difference.... by any measure, the company is undervalued. Some day (soon, I hope), when pipelines and research infrastructures again command a rational valuation, MLNM is going to move. When the products start into advanced clinicals, it's going to, IMO, explode. Rick