Compugen’s mission is to be the world leader in the discovery and licensing of product candidates to the drug and diagnostic industries under milestone and revenue sharing agreements. The Company’s increasing inventory of powerful and proprietary discovery platforms is enabling the predictive discovery – field after field – of numerous therapeutic and diagnostic product candidates.Modesty is not their forte. The thingie has never sold anything and has no income at all, and lives on start up money and great hopes. Yet, the market values it in half a billion dollars.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Is Compugen Right for Me?
I doubled my investment in Internet Zahav and am searching for the next hit. There is this small pretentious outfit in Herzliya that starts its presentation as follows:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I've only briefly looked at their website and I certainly don't think thery're worth what the market says. Computational drug discovery depends primarily on computer power (gets cheaper very year) and brainpower (many gifted people are looking for a job these daysand scientist salaries are pretty low anyway). It's possible thay may have developed some pretty nifty algorithms but structural biology is pretty competitive field, so I doubt they've anything really special. However, that doesn't matter. A big pharma outfit will buy the hype, the acquisition will drive up the share price and you can sell your stake then.
I was very dubious of the Sirtris acquisition by GSK a while back. From a purely technical standpoint, I couldn't see how the company was worth $720 million. My suspicions were later confirmed. Some of the Sirtris investors must have done well out of this, so I'm sure they don't care anyway.
Most Israeli startups are created with an eye on the exit. Compugen is burning money and the agreements mean nothing if there is nothing to sell. Israelis are trying to follow the route of Copaxon developed in the Weizmann Institute in REhovot. As you say, the development of a basic molecule needs only computers and Ph.D.s, taking it to the market needs hundreds of millions of dollars. I am wondering if the molecule development business is viable at all, as said, they didnt sell anything yet. I dont know of successful Israeli startups in this field.
It is a complex field masquerading as a complicated field.
In complexity, there is much uncertainty because of the inherently unknowable variables; eg predicting the weather; hence luck is important in complex systems work, as well as brains.
Complicated systems, by contrast, can be worked out by smart people, because all the variables can be measured or accounted for, and there is a way to get to the one correct answer. You don't need luck, you need knowledge and high cognitive skills.
Anything to do with computational biology is complex because there are far too many things which we don't even know about, or cannot measure properly, and which might or do influence outcomes, often in ways that are non-linear.
This does not mean it can't succeed, just that it will be rare and cannot be predicted.
Anon.
OK, I pass.
Post a Comment