Is the Proton a good reason to buy Life Technologies stock?

[greekkey]

Hi, all.
I think all available genomic sequencing methods are running neck to neck. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Neither LIFE nor ILLUMINA has overwhelming advantages.
In detail, PGM has lower running cost (labour cost not included), but it also has longer preparation time, as mentioned by someone above. And its biggest shortage is monopolymer recalling, which happens to be the advantage of illumina.

[epistatic]

PGM can handle low diversity runs, something the MiSeq struggles with. Amplicon runs or samples for RNA-editing would be good to reason to have a PGM around.

[Elcannibal]

Going back to your original question, the answer is NO. First off, you are better paying your house or buying one than any other stock. Second, Life is a huge company, sequencing is only a certain part of it. Third, Life's CEO is one of the worst person to execute plan and one of the best to oversell something.

Let's look at this race again, the race for market share (because there is a finite number of room for new sequencers, believe me). Where does this race take you... The manufacturing of instruments that do more, faster at a lower cost than the market can accept. A zero dollar machine at zero dollar cost that runs a genome in 0 seconds, sadly, will still not fit in a proper hospital pathology workflow (and please stop telling me Anderson or Mayo does it, that's not the global market).

Now take a look at the R&D spending for these new machines, take a look at the acquisition cost of Ion Torrent, the huge debt of solid. Now look at what their plan is: Make more machines at a lower cost using lower costs reagents for bigger results... That's a direct line to lower revenues... not your best business model.

Basically NGS at Life is in the red and growing slowly. The reality is that the cash cow is in good old forensic using capillary... We will never know because they do not want to publish NGS results only...

Life is barely keeping up in the single digit growth... that's pretty sad considering the massive cut backs and spending freeze they always have out there.

Long gone are the days of the biotech bubble my friend... this baby is saturated. I bought CRA at 12 and sold at 109$... what a joke that was...

[Elcannibal]

Originally Posted by epistatic

PGM can handle low diversity runs, something the MiSeq struggles with. Amplicon runs or samples for RNA-editing would be good to reason to have a PGM around.

Sure, but that doesn't move a stock...

[Elcannibal]

Originally Posted by greekkey

Hi, all.
I think all available genomic sequencing methods are running neck to neck. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Neither LIFE nor ILLUMINA has overwhelming advantages.
In detail, PGM has lower running cost (labour cost not included), but it also has longer preparation time, as mentioned by someone above. And its biggest shortage is monopolymer recalling, which happens to be the advantage of illumina.

Again, all this is good but has absolutely no influence on how an institutional investor will buy a block or not...

[steinmann]

Originally Posted by Elcannibal

Second, Life is a huge company, sequencing is only a certain part of it.

Yes! And a fairly small part as of now. But the sequencing market is large enough to become a major part of it.

Third, Life's CEO is one of the worst person to execute plan and one of the best to oversell something.

Why would you think so?

Let's look at this race again, the race for market share (because there is a finite number of room for new sequencers, believe me). Where does this race take you... The manufacturing of instruments that do more, faster at a lower cost than the market can accept. A zero dollar machine at zero dollar cost that runs a genome in 0 seconds, sadly, will still not fit in a proper hospital pathology workflow (and please stop telling me Anderson or Mayo does it, that's not the global market).

Now take a look at the R&D spending for these new machines, take a look at the acquisition cost of Ion Torrent, the huge debt of solid. Now look at what their plan is: Make more machines at a lower cost using lower costs reagents for bigger results... That's a direct line to lower revenues... not your best business model.

That whole part makes little sense to me. You talk like building cheaper and better devices than your competitor would be a recipe for economic failure.

[Elcannibal]

That whole part makes little sense to me. You talk like building cheaper and better devices than your competitor would be a recipe for economic failure.

This isn't a consumer market like cell phones and thingmagadjig... This is for DNA sequencing, sorry to brake the news but there is simply not enough sequencer demands to think that if you make them cheap enough, more people will buy them or use them... nope, not happening. Our head isn't strapped around that kind of deluge or workflow... not happening. Simple business model. Life is fighting a war, ILMN is simply going about doing what it does... Only one has spent almost one billion in the war of acquisition... to see it dilutes. The income is anemic and will never take a massive flight. Read the financial reports. Forget about the lab...

[steinmann]

Not going to happen? Its already happening! Plenty of smaller institutes in academia and medical diagnostic companies are now buying sequencers because of the lower initial investment and cost per run. And just because prices are going down does not mean that the big institutes will be spending less money on sequencing. They just do more of the same thing.

[krobison]

Originally Posted by Elcannibal

Let's look at this race again, the race for market share (because there is a finite number of room for new sequencers, believe me). Where does this race take you... The manufacturing of instruments that do more, faster at a lower cost than the market can accept. A zero dollar machine at zero dollar cost that runs a genome in 0 seconds, sadly, will still not fit in a proper hospital pathology workflow (and please stop telling me Anderson or Mayo does it, that's not the global market).

All markets are finite. The question is how big are they.

Leaving aside LIFE or specific technologies, sequencing is making serious inroads into healthcare. There are other approaches to integrating sequencing than just dropping it into existing pathology labs; companies such as Foundation Medicine are setting up to provide sample-to-answer solutions outside existing labs. Other groups are developing boxes which take patient DNA in at one end and generate analytical reports at the other; this is not far from standard medical analysis machines' workflow. And, in any case, there are hundreds if not thousands of large, high quality hospitals in the world that can take on these technologies, and will serve as high-volume regional centers which with whom the smaller providers feel compelled to compete. CAT & MRI used to be only at the big-name hospitals; now they are ubiquitous.

Sequencing is likely to become standard-of-care in oncology, as the value proposition is clear (better odds of picking the right expensive therapeutic option saving the health system costs and enabling better outcomes). Sequencing is likely to become standard-of-care for infants in the NICU without clear diagnoses, again leading to better health outcomes at lower cost. Infection surveillance is likely to be yet another, driven both by bioterrorism worries as well as the reality of hospital-based infections.

It's also foolish to see medicine as the only major market for sequencing. As the costs drop and the boxes get simpler, sequencing will displace other technologies (e.g. qPCR) in many markets, and there will simply be huge new markets that are currently underserved -- I would suggest agribusiness (plant & animal breeding) as one, but it is likely that significant new markets for cheap sequencing will emerge from unpredictable places, as documented repeatedly be Clayton Christensen.

[Elcannibal]

If you paid 1 billion for a technology that will reduce your revenu stream by a potential 100x, you have to ask yourself if the market will pick up 1000x of that loss...

The fact is, its just not moving that fast, hence you can buy share of a company but before that 'revolution' happens, there are tons of other players who can show up... Remember, we used to make it big with an 'automated' 377, and we all pitched into the code of life and Collins told us about the little white room with a personal pill design software... Sorry Keith but I don't really have to make a case here, you do...

Fact is, today, we still do forensic, 99% of the time on a cap... why not move in NGS ? Forensic brings in more profit... how can that be...

[Elcannibal]

Let's face it, most of the examples you make are rarely success', as far as clinical setting, it's the wildwest out there and no one is looking at this rodeo... lots of boxes still in boxes, little clinical worth and very little costs analysis on the health system. Don't get me wrong, I want sequencing... it's just basically not going to pick up as fast as you think. RT PCR is a great example, now, ACME inc make a low cost in China and OEMs that to anyone at 10K for an instrument that used to cost 100K. Any student can run one...No one would have done really well investing in QPCR.

[MrGuy]

Pretty fun watching this discussion... keep it up fellas!

With regards to:

Originally Posted by Elcannibal

No one would have done really well investing in QPCR.

Since the subject is LT, they seem to be investing heavily in qPCR specifically in the digital PCR world. They've come it with something like 3-4 new models in 2-3 years. And if I look at what I do at my facility, it is primarily qPCR. It's cheap, it's fast, it's accurate, and "anyone" can do it (depending on many, many factors of course).

NGS is icing on the cake right now and will replace sanger for clinical applications in the nearterm. Whole genome? Unlikely. Amplicon and targeted? Absolutely. Since I have a PGM, I want to jam everything on a $100 314 chip with a fusion primer approach. Libraries? No thanks. Fusion primers? Now that is cheap, fast, accurate, and "anyone" can do it.

All I need is a pliable oligo design system that will spit out an automatic solution for PCR, qPCR, Sanger, or NGS. Platform is really not that interesting in my book.

As for investing? Heck if I know. What I do know is I wouldn't take advice from a message board for that subject.

/my 2 cents

[steinmann]

Originally Posted by Elcannibal

If you paid 1 billion for a technology that will reduce your revenu stream by a potential 100x, you have to ask yourself if the market will pick up 1000x of that loss...

Out of what hat do you pull these numbers? Lets set these things straight and do some oversimplified math on the actual numbers.

1.: Life has paid 725 million for Ion Torrent.
2.: Illumina is worth 5800 million (according to Mr. Market and Roche).

If Life ends up eating Illuminas lunch that makes the acquisition of Ion Torrent a really good deal. But of course there is no guarantee for that. So what does the likelihood of that happening need to be for the deal to have positive expected value? Based on these numbers more than 12.5%.

[Elcannibal]

Funny you speak of digital PCR... Digital PCR is pretty old, goes back to the days of Vogelstein for somatic mutation detection. It's also been shown to be rather... worthless. Go price a single digital pcr chip or array... Just not worth it. Digital PCR for Life is only a way to get leads, most users never touch digital since they could just get a simpler BioRad machine.

My real point is: If digital is so hot, then why does and machine for digital originally priced at 129,999.00 now barely sells at around 50,000.00. Getting back to the subject. This kind of revenue is just not going to make your stock grow...

Life gobling up Illumina... LOL, if Roche can't do it, I know Life can't even dream of it, plus the markets... No authority would have that.

Look, review this from all sides. If you know anything about Life, you know it has been sitting in a single digit growth market (that is said to be growing faster than a speeding bullet), and that growth mainly comes from cut backs...

Now, let's send a sequencer on Mars, ET needs one...

I'm not arguing here, sequencing is a great technology, the original post was about investment. Life and Illumina, will be duds on the long run because they will likely always need to fight off spin off attacks that come out with cheaper faster solution.

That vision you have, is the same that rolls over and over. Eric Schadt had big dreams at Pac Bio, Pac who ? Eric who ?

[steinmann]

Originally Posted by Elcannibal

That vision you have, is the same that rolls over and over. Eric Schadt had big dreams at Pac Bio, Pac who ? Eric who ?

I know you are just trolling, but you raise an important point. Given what we have experienced with Helicos, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore why should we expect Ion Torrent to be any different?

1.: Helicos, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore were all desperate for money and presented with two options:
A) Lie about their technology and sell a few machines / get more funding to survive for a little longer and maybe pull off a miracle.
B) Give up and file bankruptcy.
Of course they lied to us. From their perspective it was the only rational thing to do! Life Technologies is different in that they have more money than they can invest (they use excess funds for buying their own stock). They have little to gain in lying to us.

2.: Part of Life Technologies business model is selling quality reagents at a premium. They get away with this because their brands have a positive image. Lying to their customers puts that image at danger. So unlike for the other companies the only thing that lying about their product does for them is to put their brand equity at risk.

3.: With the PGM they have shown that their technology works, that its scalable, generates sales and their announcements come true. Why believe that this should be any different for the Proton?

[Elcannibal]

I'm just joking but I have been around sequencing for almost 25 years now, a good part of it within some of the big players. The reality on the inside is always a little bit sarcastic than that dreamy rosie world of sequencing. Now, my time is more within true clinical applications. My general feeling is that 99% of folks using sequencers have little understanding of the realm of direct to patient diagnostic. Hell, weren't we supposed to have a 501K sequencer at some point ?

[snetmcom]

Originally Posted by steinmann

Out of what hat do you pull these numbers? Lets set these things straight and do some oversimplified math on the actual numbers.

1.: Life has paid 725 million for Ion Torrent.
2.: Illumina is worth 5800 million (according to Mr. Market and Roche).

If Life ends up eating Illuminas lunch that makes the acquisition of Ion Torrent a really good deal. But of course there is no guarantee for that. So what does the likelihood of that happening need to be for the deal to have positive expected value? Based on these numbers more than 12.5%.

i only saw a press release for the first milestone payment. Did IT actually meet the milestones for the whole 700 million?

[steinmann]

Yes, they mentioned the second (300 million) milestone payment in the Q1 earnings report.

[Elcannibal]

Lemme tell you, that sequencing market for Life Tech is exploding. They can't sell enough of them. They can barely close the bank doors... It's gonna be a rocking cost cutting quarter with a few serious patent wars to come too. Prepare yourself for some aggressive reps... Now is the time to get your questionable free Ipad...

[steinmann]

Well that's some truly exciting news!