Enterprise Biotech firm aims to corner market with point-of-care tests

Biosite


Founded:

1988

President and CEO:

Kim Blickenstaff

Employees:

347

Revenues:

$54.9 million in 2000

Net income:

$6.2 million for 2000

Headquarters:

11030 Roselle St., San Diego, 92121

Business:

Diagnostics company

In 1988, Kim Blickenstaff scribbled out a business plan based on what he described as one “cute little product.”

He planned to develop it, sell it to a larger diagnostic firm and that would be the end of Biosite Inc. in San Diego.

But it didn’t quite work out that way.

Thirteen years later, Blickenstaff and his colleagues have cornered a niche market with their rapid result point-of-care drug abuse test.

Biosite also won marketing clearance for devices diagnosing heart attacks and congestive heart failure and hopes to introduce a diagnostic for stroke victims.

Biosite has broken from the traditional diagnostics firms by developing its own research program while partnering with pharmaceutical firms to expedite the search for new drug targets in return for diagnostic rights.

Biosite has yet to prove its financial model , leveraging off the discovery of pharma and biotech partners , works in the long term.

But some financial analysts and doctors share Blickenstaff’s optimism.

David Lewis, an analyst for Thomas Weisel Partners of San Francisco, projected revenues of $67.7 million at 53 cents in earnings per share for 2001 and $82.7 million in revenues at 84 cents in earnings per share for 2002.

“Biosite is the biggest player in the point-of-care drug-abuse testing (and has) no competition for its B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) product aimed at congestive heart failure and discovered a variety of markers that have diagnostic utility for stroke,” Lewis said.

But success didn’t come easily.

Blickenstaff started Biosite with two scientists who worked with him at San Diego’s first biotechnology firm, Hybritech.

Hybritech’s commercial success was built on a pregnancy test sold to doctor’s offices that didn’t have to be sent to a lab for analysis.

The company’s high profile led Eli Lilly