To: Rocketman who wrote (776 ) 11/5/1998 3:32:00 PM From: Craig Lacy Read Replies (2) | Respond to
I agree with you that this release is going to drive the stock up, way up in fact, but I think part of the reason is misinformation about what INCY actually owns. First, the patent does not guarantee that they will have a product (ex pharmaceutical) for mass distribution, nor do they have the rights to products which interact with the genes or the gene products (proteins). ALL THEY HAVE IS INFORMATION. And information is only valuable if it can be used to develop a product. Now, they have a leg up on the competition because they have acquired this possibly valuable information before other companies and they have the rights to distribute this information. Now, I am not extremely familiar with patent law, but if I were a competitor who did not want to pay royalties or for the data base, I could sequence the genes myself, and use that information, or not use it, or simply analyze the protein products of a gene, to develop a drug which interacts with the protein but gives no hint to the sequence that has been protected. So for example, lets say I develop a drug which inhibits one of the protein kinases that have been patented, I may or may not have used information which has been protected in some of the preliminary work (that would need to be established in court) but the product that I have created would likely contain few if any clues that I had used that information. So, to use an analogy posted earlier, lets say they own the rights to a TV vacuum tube, and I am using a television that I made to develop a top of the line VCR. I doubt that they could prove that I had infringed on their rights to the vacuum tube even though I developed a product using the vacuum tube technology they owned.
