Very true, IMHO!:
RE: "You cant just find a replacement for KBLB if you are an investor."
(updated repost)
1) a product with far greater chances of success than is generally appreciated thanks to the use of zinc fingers (meaning a much greater potential reward). Monster silk has already demonstrated the ability to get silkworms to incorporate spider silk protein(SSP) into the structure of their silk. That excludes the most likely reasons for failure: that the SSP would be toxic to silkworms or that it would not function within their metabolic pathways or that it would not incorporate properly into the structure of the silk. Those risks vastly outweighed the few that remain, IMHO. Success is still not guaranteed but the odds are greatly improved. With zinc fingers, changes and improvements can be made rapidly and reliably, both in stark contrast to what was possible before zinc fingers. Many problems that before would have been major stumbling blocks become minor delays. (I'll post later today a link to an audio tape that describes just how powerful ZFs are (and also mentions what KBLB is doing), as soon as I can find a STABLE link to it.)
2) a product that could be on the market in far less time than usual: i) no regulatory approval required for environmental release of genetically modified organisms (silkworms cannot survive in the wild) ii) no FDA approval required (except for a few medical applications) iii) no time required to build manufacturing facilities: already existing silk manufacturing facilities can be used just by switching out the worms. (Note that even with those advantages you still have to allow a reasonable amount of time for the part that still has to be done!) You still have to breed the worms up to production population but that's far faster than building a factory.
3) a product for which the manufacturing process is already very well known and well established; no bugs or development problems to work out. (Silk processing has been done for over 5,000 years! It is already highly mechanized and all details very well worked out. The only thing KBLB will need to do differently is just use different silkworms.)
4) a product in exceptionally high demand - one of the "holy grails" of materials industry for a long time with properties that no other material can match.
5) a product for which the known market size is very large and and very high value
6) a product with vast potential for expansion into a wide range of high value uses (by modifying the characteristics, addition of properties (antibiotic, etc) , even completely new products (artificial sequence, etc.)
7) a product for which the company has a very firm IP lock on the market: no one else will be able to compete - no one has come remotely close to being able to mechanically spin spider protein into silk, no one else has a way to modify silk worms to do it because KBLB owns the use of bot zinc fingers and the piggyBac transposon to do that and no other method of GM can do it PLUS KBLB owns rights on over 200 spider genes involved in making silk. Then there is also the heptcidin antibiotic molecue, the artifical sequence, the patent on vaccine/antibodies etc.
8) a product which could produce spin off products from preliminary developments to help finance the company (chopped strand products from holed cocoons from breeding up the Monster Silk worms population; the Monster Silk (or another of the silks from the 20 lines of transgenic worms) for the commercial silk garments and accessories market, etc.
9) and a current market cap of only about about $52* million for a company that could grow to one of $40 billion in ten years. *obviously varies with SP
10) financing that minimizes dilution both by getting a much better price for shares due to a "share pricing at time of use" type (line of credit) agreement and to only getting the money as and IF needed (so if KBLB gets sales THIS YEAR (which it could) from the company currently testing its product from the holed cocoons then KBLB can reduce the amount of money it gets from the financing by that much. [[this one is sure to get the “zinc appendages” boiling! We've been thru it many times and probably will have to again]]
11) the product development work is all being done by top notch scientists at highly reputable universities.
12) But MOST OF ALL products with a HUGE PROFIT MARGIN due to low cost of manufacturing combined with a very strong IP lock on a very high value product. (It is very unusual to know what the costs of manufacturing will be at this stage of development. Knowing that it will be low is a very major advantage!) If KBLB is successful, it will be VERY successful.
This is not "gambling", it is investing. Long term investing. Timing is highly uncertain and you need to be able to leave the money in for awhile to give time for developments to proceed. Gambling is when you trade based on just the charts and numbers without understanding the company. There are, as always, risks. But what is exceptional about this company, IMHO, is the very high rewards to risk ratio.
Such a combination of factors is rare, particularly the factors allowing for much faster development than is usually possible.
Delays may happen and problems may arise (this is cutting edge research). But if so, because of the potential of the technology, the remarkable progress to date and the far more effective tools now available, they will IMHO be overcome.
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