Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Hi, krenjp. Many of your comments were addressed in #4621, which you may not have noticed.

>> I have to disagree that only a drug with vision improvement can become a blockbuster; although we would all dream of seeing vision improvement for all patients. <<

That’s OK –after all, disagreement is the reason we have a stock market. But I would like to point out that Visudyne has now been on the market for half a decade (four years in the U.S.), it has essentially had a monopoly in the worldwide AMD market, and yet it is not a blockbuster by most people’s definition, doing $400-500M in annual worldwide sales. Visudyne has been a commercial disappointment to Novartis, and that’s one reason NVS decided to license the ex-U.S. rights to Lucentis from Genentech.

If Visudyne were able to restore lost vision in at least a sizable minority of patients, it would probably be selling at least $2B annually, instead of one-fourth that amount. Regards, Dew