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Biotech / Medical : IGEN International -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Renee who wrote (378)	6/17/1998 6:00:00 PM
From: James Perry	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1025

Renee, what is IBD? As the guess of an illiterate in the science field, I would think a single plate machine is one that reads one test at a time - thus, a poc device.

To: Renee who wrote (378)	6/26/1998 2:20:00 AM
From: John Zwiener	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1025

Renee, I finally got a copy of the IBD article. It makes my estimates look like peanuts. The info came from Nationsbank Montgomery Securities, analyst Herriot Tabuteau. Is this analyst any good? Did not go into detail about Boehringer Mannheim, but did have a list of ECLM applications... Drug discovery...536 million market potential..,est. launch Q1 1999 Single plate reader...$330...............................Q3 1999 Patient monitering....$3.6 billion!!!???.............Q1 2001 Urgent Care device..$1.5 billion!!??...............Q1 2002 Doctors Office POC..$780 million...................Q1 2002 Veterinary POC.........$723 million...................Q1 2001 Industrial/environ.....$205 million...................Q1 2001 Drug discovery, doctors POC, and indust/environ devices are Igen alone, the other 4 are to be with partners. The first one, drug discovery, is estimated close to what I think is doable. The others have numbers cited that boggle the mind and I am cautious in taking them seriously. For example, if Igen really does approach $500 million for drug discovery applications, one is looking at Igen price at 350 to 700 dollars a share,,for this alone. (est. 80% margins). Even though the POC devices and single plate reader would have partners, Igen would manufacture the reagents so maybe they would be looking at 25% income from these. By the way, I am not sure what Igen has in mind for the single plate reader,,,what comes to mind for me are the instruments that are manually loaded one plate at a time, these could have one subject to be measured, or many wells on one plate. They could also be loaded in an incubating instrument that at predetermined time intervals, run the plates through the reader to look for a reaction that would only occur when the target is produced(say by a bacteria or cellular breakdown). I'll try to remember to ask exactly what they have in mind. On another note, I continue to believe that Roche is paying Igen less than 1/5th the royalties due to them. This would make Igen profitable as of last year. From the royalties paid versus instruments placed for at least 6 months, it looks like Roche is claiming the 1010 and 2010 are generating only an average of $15-17,000 per instrument. This of course is rediculous. Considering manufacturing and reagent costs, plus the investment costs, Roche would have to be losing money.....Yet Roche continues to place them at a pace believed to be very rapid, plus they continue to develop new tests for this instrument. I will just repeat that even a small hospital with rock bottom rates pays over $100,000 to a company like Roche or BM, for ONLY 3 tests. The electsys has over 30 tests now (granted most of these tests are run in smaller numbers, but you get the drift). Once this royalty dispute is disposed of, Igen could be valued at $100 to 200 on that deal alone, on 1 billion sales, and possibly, Roche could get to 2 billion, or 1/3 the market. (And it looks like they could do it). But these estimates for the different POC devices, I don't know. If executed well , and if these numbers are realistic, this analyst is implying over $1 billion of profit in this area. I would remind myself that this is still a very unproven area where the concept of POC has not really proven itself well enough to consider such numbers, therefore I would have to not consider this area yet as a big income producer for the time being. Regards