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Biotech / Medical : VVUS: VIVUS INC. (NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mkilloran who wrote (19106)	2/25/1999 6:16:00 PM
From: VLAD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23519

martin, It would be interesting to find out more about Janssen's marketing arm in China. We have over 3 billion people in China spending over one billion annually on sexual aids. If Janssen has a good distribution system in China I think that we can see sales in China easily in excess of $100M in the first year post launching.

To: Mkilloran who wrote (19106)	2/25/1999 8:04:00 PM
From: DaiS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23519

MK, Just to clarify my earlier post. Actually Vivus has published 12 papers - think about it, Vivus cannot have published more papers than Pfizer! I simply standardised the number so that it was per billion dollars of market capitalisation. I think I would get the same result looking at R&D expenditure but have not checked yet. Remember also that the 12 does not include the gene therapy work and many many other papers and abstracts published by the scientists/doctors who are associated with Vivus. Actually I did the analysis for a bit of fun, and apart from Vlad's point it does confirm what I have said before about Vivus. They are cunning by contracting out much of the research - this gives the good publication record for little capital backup. Well it is not really contracting out because these people are Vivus consultants probably with options, they are insiders. Also think about Drs Christ and Melman at Albert Einstein Medical Centre. They have excellent work dating back to early 1990s or earlier which laid the foundation for the gene therapy work. Vivus did not pay for this and even now do not pay the salaries of these men - I assume? I simply don't know what labs Vivus have of its own, any to speak of? Instead they probably avoid considerable overheads, salaries and equipment expenses by having the research done in other labs. When I first came on the thread last May, I was mocking the suggestion that Vivus were doing gene therapy research - then I saw how they did it. On this basis you can do a hell of a lot for $2M a quarter. Pfizer and Zeneca have their own big labs to pay for. I guess the Alibra trials are expensive - but are they? At a recent conference I saw some viagra posters. Pfizer were paying something like $200 per patient in a 150 patient trial over 6 months to the small team of docs doing the trial, add to this the cost of the drug, maybe a research assistant, a PC? Well a lot of speculation above but just my thoughts FWIW. Maybe I got it wrong. I can post these paper abstracts all together if anybody wishes, most or all have already been posted DaiS