SAN FRANCISCO _ The handful of publicly traded genomicscompanies, as a group, rank as the star performers on Wall Street inthe biotechnology sector the past few years.

Matthew Murray, analyst for UBS Securities Inc. in New York, saidMonday the firms' stocks not only have beaten the variousbiotechnology stock indices, but also those of another hot sector _Internet companies.

Incyte Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., was the firstgenomics company to go public in November 1993, followed closelyby Human Genome Sciences Inc., of Rockville, Md., in December1993. Their stocks, Murray observed, soared more than 350 percentfrom the initial public offerings until about mid-February 1996.

Since the successes of Incyte and Human Genome Sciences, threeothers ventured into the public markets: Genome Therapeutics Inc.,of Cambridge, Mass., Sequana Therapeutics Inc., of La Jolla, Calif.,and Myriad Genetics Inc., of Salt Lake City.

Murray's comments were made at a third annual conference in SanFrancisco on commercial applications of the Human Genome Project,which is the government-sponsored effort to identify all human genesand discover the underlying genetic mechanisms of disease.

Genomics companies primarily are in the business of sellinginformation _ genetic data discovered through gene sequencing andmapping _ to pharmaceutical companies for use in developing drugsthat are many years away from becoming actual treatments or curesfor diseases.

Big pharma has responded in a huge way. Since Human GenomeSciences entered a $125 million deal with SmithKline Beecham plc,of London, in May 1993, drug makers have signed collaborationswith eight genomics companies that could receive more than $800million during the course of the collaborations. The figure alsoincludes up to $90 million that Amgen Inc., of Thousand Oaks,Calif., agreed to pay New York-based Rockefeller University forrights to the obesity gene and its leptin protein.

"Genomics is information for drug companies," said Murray. Andbecause much of the mystery of the human genome is stillundiscovered, the firms' growth potential is significant, he suggested.

However, commercial genomics companies are not the only researchorganizations discovering genes, sequencing and mapping them onchromosomes and trying to discern their functions.

Academic, non-profit institutes and government researchers also areworking to unravel human genetic secrets and their information dailyis deposited in public data bases with no proprietary restrictionsattached.

Among issues examined at the Human Genome Project conference isthe competition between proprietary data bases maintained bycommercial companies and public data bases _ the largest beingGenBank, which is run by the National Center for BiotechnologyInformation within the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

GenBank is part of a global network of public genomic mapping andsequencing data bases.

Mark Boguski, a GenBank senior investigator, said the amount ofinformation received by GenBank is growing exponentially.

"By the end of 1996 we will have 25,000 mapped human genes,"Boguski said.

GenBank's data bases, he added, include partial sequences for 46,000genes. But only about 4,000 have been identified and characterizedby their biological functions.

The number of genes in the human genome is the subject of muchdebate. Estimates vary from 70,000 to 100,000 and beyond.

GenBank officials, he added, believe their data bases contain about80 percent of all human gene sequences discovered, suggesting thatonly 20 percent of those in data bases of commercial genomiccompanies are proprietary. n

-- Charles Craig Staff Writer

(c) 1997 American Health Consultants. All rights reserved.