Memo - Investment Recommendation for Centagenetix
Memo
To: Todd Foley
From: Joel Greggain
Re: Investment Recommendation for Centagenetix
Date: April 23, 2001
Todd,
After looking over the material regarding Centagenetix, I have a recommendation as to whether or not MPM should invest in Centagenetix. I realize that we have spent a great deal of time and resources on this project already, and that Harvard Medical School is anticipating that this deal will go forward. I also realize that backing out of the deal now could reflect badly upon MPM and upon you, but my recommendation is that MPM invest in Centagenetix at this point. The main reason is that if Centagenetix is actually able to create a product to increase human longevity, there are some major questions and concerns about first getting this product to market, as well as what conditions this product might carry for measurable efficacy and if the market will be willing to accept them. I will discuss other considerations shortly but I think that is itself a potential deal-breaker. Let us first consider the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). While it is a worthwhile and interesting study, with good correlations between family members and a sample pool large enough to provide preliminary findings, it still has some weaknesses. The two major ones being how geographically centric it is and the size of it. Scientists who study aging have long argued that environment and lifestyle play the largest role in longevity, but Centagenetix is setting out to see if that is incorrect: if there is in fact a heritable gene (or genes) for longevity. It would seem that in order to provide a strong argument that the study reaches beyond environment, there should be more samples from areas beyond the eight towns around Boston that the NECS used. It could also be a problem that the majority of the centenarians used had no history of smoking or obesity and were generally small in stature. Granted that using these samples, they found a linkage on chromosome 4, but this does
To: Todd Foley
From: Joel Greggain
Re: Investment Recommendation for Centagenetix
Date: April 23, 2001
Todd,
After looking over the material regarding Centagenetix, I have a recommendation as to whether or not MPM should invest in Centagenetix. I realize that we have spent a great deal of time and resources on this project already, and that Harvard Medical School is anticipating that this deal will go forward. I also realize that backing out of the deal now could reflect badly upon MPM and upon you, but my recommendation is that MPM invest in Centagenetix at this point. The main reason is that if Centagenetix is actually able to create a product to increase human longevity, there are some major questions and concerns about first getting this product to market, as well as what conditions this product might carry for measurable efficacy and if the market will be willing to accept them. I will discuss other considerations shortly but I think that is itself a potential deal-breaker. Let us first consider the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). While it is a worthwhile and interesting study, with good correlations between family members and a sample pool large enough to provide preliminary findings, it still has some weaknesses. The two major ones being how geographically centric it is and the size of it. Scientists who study aging have long argued that environment and lifestyle play the largest role in longevity, but Centagenetix is setting out to see if that is incorrect: if there is in fact a heritable gene (or genes) for longevity. It would seem that in order to provide a strong argument that the study reaches beyond environment, there should be more samples from areas beyond the eight towns around Boston that the NECS used. It could also be a problem that the majority of the centenarians used had no history of smoking or obesity and were generally small in stature. Granted that using these samples, they found a linkage on chromosome 4, but this does