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Biotech / Medical : ICOS Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: limit who wrote (676)	5/10/1999 11:39:00 PM
From: Lel H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1139

Hi limit, I received the annual report (finally) as well. Apparently, ICOS had run short during its printing run; all I got from my broker was the 10K and I had to call IR to request one of those slick looking publications. Very prompt in fulfilling my request, I might add. There is an article in the most recent issue of Genetic Engineering News that discusses the problems that have plagued other attempts at anti-sepsis drugs. It highlighted the fact that sepsis is a complex process that has "redundant" mechanisms, such that intervening at one point doesn't solve the entire problem. I believe that it mentioned that there are about a dozen drugs currently in phase II and later trials for sepsis, and that there are about a dozen drugs that have failed in clinical trials. ICOS, of course, is not mentioned, since IC14 is just barely into the clinics. I don't know enough about the specific sepsis mechanisms and how CD14 plays a role in these processes to speculate about its chances for success, but it's clearly going to be an uphill fight, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if ICOS stumbles on this one. It'll be some time before anyone knows anything. In the same issue, there was a list of the top 50 biotech companies. I only glanced at the table, and saw that ICOS was on the list. However, the ranking appeared to based only on market cap and nothing else, which seems like a pretty arbitrary and artificial way of rating companies. I wouldn't put much weight into this ranking.