Ah, Biotime. The hype here is a bit on the over optimistic side, IMHO.
I saw a demo of Hextend in freezing a hamster at the first Alcor
Cryonics Festival about 2 years ago. It worked. Catch is, the amount of
freezing is quite small, about -2 to -5 degrees C. I'm glad they've been
able to do this with a bonobo, but it's a long, long way to -196 C.
In 1966, Biotime started at about $2.00 and went up to around $30.00. I
bought some at $5.00... Biotime offered some warrants at $20 - one share
for every 10 that I owned. I excercised these when Biotime was around
$30.00.
Then it began to sag, and I put in a stop order at $25. Biotime promptly
went to $ 24.50 and then rose and rose, now trading at about the
equivalent of $54.00 (It split 3 to 1, so the list price is $17 at my
last look). Oh well, I only made a 5 to 1 win here...
What pushed Biotime into the 60s for while was that the FDA has
basically approved (I am a little hazy on the details here) Hextend for
further human clinical trials.
Though I feel Hextend is an excellent product, I feel that its prospects
are less rosy than the Biotime people say for these reasons:
1. The best so far blood extenders cost about
$40 per liter. Biotime wants to sell Hextend
at $100 per liter.
2. The entire blood extender market is at present
about $ 30 million per year. Biotime's book value
is around $200 million, for a company with around
a dozen employees. These numbers don't quite make
sense, unless the blood extension market grows a
lot.
3. There's a LOT of work going on for blood substitutes
by the competition. Note that blood substitution is the
really big market, much more than blood extension.
I'll put it this way: If I hadn't sold at $25, I'd certainly sell now
and wait about a year...
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| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
| Box 8334 Santa Cruz, CA 95061 |
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