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

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (4865)	5/11/1998 12:55:00 PM
From: Rocketman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9719

I propose buying all the INCY we can get today with the available buying power. I think this is a major INCY buying opportunity along the lines of the Blech fiasco dump of '94. This reeks of over-reaction. First of all, these PKN machines don't yet exist and are still in development. They are capillary electrophoresis systems. INCY has been working with capillary systems, developing them in-house and with MDYN for about a year and a half now. PKN customers will have access to the systems also, so if the throughput increase is really this great and the cost savings so good, INCY will realize them too. Also, this completely ignores the mass spec systems being developed that make electrophoresis seems quaint in its slowness. There is a hell of a lot of important DNA out there besides human. While PKN is going after the entire genome, INCY and HGSI have already got their hooks in the vast majority of the important genes, PKN is just filling in the blanks, especially in the non-coding regions. Just because PKN puts the sequence data into the public domain doesn't mean that the public owns it because INCY could already have discovered and filed for patents on it. In the meantime, any Pharma who tries to save a few million a year and develops "public genes" may find out many years after the fact that they don't own what they developed and that they are retroactively negotiating with INCY for something that now has clear value and no easily gotten 1% royalty contract with INCY. My guess is that in these situations that INCY will take them to the cleaners for a huge royalty or block the products. Even when the patents are known, major companies screw up, Kodak once had instant photography systems until Polaroid cleaned house and took their cash and stopped them. Much of the value of the INCY database is not in the raw sequence data, but most just don't understand this. Most of the value is in the comparative expression levels in the various tissues, liver vs spleen, cancerous liver vs normal liver vs various types and stages of diseased liver, etc..... This is where you start to get clues as to what to target for drugs and diagnostics and what the various genes are doing. Raw sequence data just does not get you this. Also, the whole functional genomics realm plays into this. Raw sequence data just doesn't tell you what you have, you need more effort to get out what this data means, and companies such as INCY's Genome Systems will be very important in figuring out what genes do. If you want access to a one-stop genomics platform services group, INCY is still the only play on the planet. If you are happy with a piecemeal approach with vast uncertainty as to who owns the rights, then I guess INCY isn't for you. Rman