STORY UPDATES
GAITHERSBURG, Md.—February 23, 2007—In announcing its Q4 and full-year 2006 results, Gene Logic stated it has engaged outside advisors to seek strategic alternatives for its beleaguered Genomics Division, including the possibility of a spin-off in which the parent company will retain equity. For Q4 2006, the division reported an operating loss of $2.5 million, down from a $4.2-million loss in Q4 2005. For the 12 months of 2006, the division reported an operating loss of $25.5 million, compared to a $5.6 million operating profit for full-year 2005.
GAITHERSBURG, Md.—December 15, 2006—As a culmination of its strategic realignment, Gene Logic announced the sale of its Preclinical Division to Bridge Pharmaceuticals, a global CRO, for $15 million. 'This sale enables us to focus our resources and talents on growing our business in drug repositioning," says Mark Gessler, Gene Logic president and CEO.
GAITHERSBURG, Md.—September 22, 2006—Gene Logic announced the findings of a business review conducted over the previous 90 days of its varying business operations. Following on the restructuring of its Genomics division, the company noted that while its plans continue apace, it will retain its core competencies to support both its existing customers, as well as to obtain new customers for current products and services. Similarly, it is looking to use these competencies to support its growing drug repositioning and clinical biomarker development businesses.
GAITHERSBURG, Md.—Gene Logic Inc. has withdrawn previously issued financial guidance for 2006 and 2007 in the wake of lower-than anticipated revenue for one of its three divisions both for the second quarter and for the full year 2006. The culprit is, interestingly enough, the genomics division, which is the original core business upon which Gene Logic was founded.
On the plus side, performance for Gene Logic's drug repositioning division remains on track, the company reports, and the preclinical division is expected to show substantial improvement over the prior quarter. Full plans for righting the genomics division should be released sometime in September once a strategy review has been completed, according to Philip L. Rohrer, CFO and principal accounting officer for the company.
He did note, however, that the key problem in the genomics division is that it had become too dependent on subscription fees from large pharma for its extensive gene expression database. This weakness in the division was known to management and the company had already begun to take steps to shift the business model away from this dependency before subscriptions began to decline.
"What was going on with subscriptions was very predictable," Rohrer says. "What caught us off-guard was the rapidity with which those subscriptions dropped off."
Plans underway include parsing the databases to sell in different ways than full subscriptions, offering perpetual licenses, and expanding services for running large numbers of genomic samples for large pharma companies—an effort aided by the recent addition of SNP chip-based services.
Looking bright is the newest arm of the company, the drug repositioning division, which was created after acquiring several technology platforms from Millennium Pharmaceuticals in summer 2004. The division is focused on finding alternate uses for drugs that died in drug development for reasons other than toxicity.
