April 11th, 2008 by tommy

Is investing into cutting edge genetic companies a good long term investing play? Or is the reality of companies making REAL profits in this sector so far off, that it is not worth the opportunity cost of capital at this junction in time?

Earlier this week I was able to attend an opening event in New York for a genetic testing company called Navigenics: a new company startup out of The Valley funded by none other than by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers. The crux of the business is offering insight into your health future via genetic testing. The bet is that there’s enough of a market out there right now to cough up $1500 and a dollop of saliva in order to determine their genetic risk profile for diseases. It seems the technology is there: and certainly, with our ever widening gap between have and haven’t, there will be enough people with disposable income to pay for a glance into the genetic crystal ball that is DNA testing.

I would imagine this product is a marketers dream… you could go a million directions positioning this product. Certainly the logical direction, which the company’s website indicates, is providing people a sense of control in their destiny that is a commercial first of its kind. Parents wanting to ‘be there’ for their kids, and whatnot.

Obviously, Navigenics is start up, so there’s no investing in this particular venture. Well, not yet at least. But I myself do have some long term capital tied up in Clinical Data (CLDA), which focuses on pharmacogenomics: a big fancy word not in my spell checker which means a process of tailoring drugs to a person’s genetic profile to increase efficacy and mitigate toxicity. Remember the old joke about having ‘Designer Genes’. This would kind of be the Designer Drugs to go in the key pocket of those Designer Genes. Hopefully my DNA will keep me around long enough find out I made a good investment.

-Tommy