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Biotech / Medical : Incyte (INCY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry Liebman who wrote (845)	2/4/1999 8:25:00 AM
From: Geoff Altman	Respond to of 3202

Totally agree. I was momentarily stunned by INCYs recent fluctuations. Then I came to my senses and remembered why I bought it to begin with and was tempted to sell some other stock so I could buy more INCY in the dip.

To: Larry Liebman who wrote (845)	2/4/1999 9:27:00 AM
From: j.d.robbins	Respond to of 3202

Larry, Can i get the H&Q from you? can you print it here thanks j.d.long incy

To: Larry Liebman who wrote (845)	2/7/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: Rocketman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3202

On the Yahoo threads, it was asked by dnatogo: <<<<<<<<<<< INCY TO WIN? If I understand the press release of last week they are basically foregoing earnings this year to win the race for the human genome. Any thoughts on whether they can pull this off? Does anyone have first hand knowledge of their management and infrastructure vs. Celera and the public domain effort? Clearly the market reacted positively to the news. >>>>>>>>>> My response: Absolutely INCY can win the race. They have a bigger, better, broader, faster and farther along approach to sequencing the human genome than anyone else. Celera is a wannabe, who is starting way too late to be a dominant player in the game. No doubt Celera will pick up the intellectual property rights to a minor number of genes, but the vast bulk of what Celera will find will already have been sequenced by INCY who will have patent precedence. Celera can have all the junk non-coding DNA, it just isn't the important and commercially viable stuff, even though it may have great basic research value. Coding genes is where the money is and will be. Also, if the PE3700 machines that Celera will be using turn out to be better than the MegaBace systems that INCY has been using in production for 2 years now, then INCY will switch to them. Celera doesn't have some kind of monopoly on them. But, if the MegaBace (or future generations of it) turn out to be superior to the PE3700 (as many think they will) Celera's hands will be tied by its parent and it will use the PE3700 regardless of which is superior. Plus, there is a LOT more to a sequencing operation than having a room full of fast machines. There is the upstream and downstream processing of both the materials and information for instance. As far as public domain sequencing data goes, much of it is not of very high quality (it is student grade work) and does not have the extensive annotation of the INCY data. Most everything INCY does is repeatively sequenced which cuts the error rate significantly versus the public data, and you can get the clones with the DNA from INCY, try doing that with public sequences - good luck. Plus, anything public, INCY also uses in addition to their databases. But, more importantly, INCY is acutely aware of all the public data, as it is constantly crunched against their proprietary data. This tells INCY what is in the public domain that INCY has patent precedence on. One cannot forget the importance of the patents. Just because sequencing data has been revealed publicly by someone doesn't mean that you can use it without infringing on an issued or future INCY patent. There is IMO a huge amount of infringement going on currently, but until it is shown to be commercially worth it and comes onto INCY's radar screen, then they will not be pursuing the infringements in a legal manner. Plus, the slow pace of the PTO to issue genomic patents will just exacerbate this problem. Any pharma or biotech that develops genomic based products without fully knowing who owns the intellectual property rights are fools being set up for a fall. Just because pharmas are huge doesn't mean that they can get away with infringing. Once upon a time, a company named Kodak got into instant photography. While it took many years to do it, a company named Polaroid got to eat Kodak's breakfast, lunch and dinner to the tune of over a billion dollars when the patent case was finally decided, without ever licensing the rights to Kodak to use the patents. What further complicates all of this is the possibility that having an EST of part of a gene may very well give you the right to control usage of the gene as a whole (as implied in an article in Science by the PTO's Bruce Lehman last spring). Well, INCY has over 2.5 million unique ESTs, 5' and 3' ends of over 110,000 human genes and 10,000 full length genes sequenced. This encompasses a huge portion of the human genome. Using public domain data in lieu of doing a deal with INCY is a suckers bet (but PT Barnum was right!). Yes INCY can win and will win the race. Rocketman