Word: biotechs
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...have to have a strong stomach to invest in biotechnology. Last year a few words from Tony Blair and Bill Clinton about making genes "freely available to scientists" took half the value out of the typical biotech stock within a month. Early this year, when Celera Genomics and the Human Genome Project said they would publish a working draft of the human genome (the full complement of human genes), biotech shares rallied briefly...
...they took another dive, in part because of news that the draft included fewer than 40,000 genes--about 60,000 short of the number expected. After Sept. 11, biotech crashed along with the rest of the market, but it has lately risen resolutely. One reason is all the talk of bioterrorism and the need for remedies. But the other, more important one is that biotech firms, many of which survived for years on their promise, are increasingly turning into real businesses, with real managers, products and earnings...
...recasting themselves as little pharmaceutical firms and buying up smaller companies to fill the holes in their drug-development technology. Meanwhile, big drugmakers such as Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, under pressure to jump-start their slowing rates of drug discovery, are investing billions of dollars in collaborations with biotech firms to mine the genome for new medicines...
That prompted Cephalon, the biotech firm that markets the drug in the U.S., to begin studies to determine whether the pill could prove useful for a wider variety of problems, including obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which various breathing problems make restful sleep nearly impossible. (Even after successful treatment of the breathing problem, some people with sleep apnea still feel extremely drowsy during the day.) Last week Cephalon announced plans to acquire--for $450 million in cash--the small French pharmaceutical company from which it licenses Provigil...
When U.S. biotech firm advanced Cell Technology announced last week that it had cloned the first human embryo, Europeans greeted the news with a mixture of interest, suspicion and revulsion. Scientists are keen to explore cloning as a potential source of embryonic stem cells, which could be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, but many question the validity of ACT's results...