Mr. Colin Higbie

Colin Higbie, president of Aptagen Inc., concurred.Higbie heads a Reston, Va., biotech firm that builds genes for pharmaceutical companies, the National Institutes of Health and academic clients.Aptagen and other, similar firms are recruiting sales representatives with little or no biotechnology training to market their products because they've found that talented reps can apply their selling skills to just about any product, even a highly technical one."There's really a deficit of good salespeople in biotech right now," Higbie said.

"The rapid success of this project underscores how Aptagen's DNA- engineering methods turn promising science into commercially viable products," said Colin Higbie, President of Aptagen.

Two weeks ago, Colin Higbie and George DeVaux made what may be the final cut in the work force at Aptagen Labs.
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Higbie, Aptagen's president, took a cut in pay, and Chairman and CEO DeVaux isn't being paid at all.

"A gene is a recipe, and unless we can bake the brownies, we have nothing to sell," says Colin Higbie, president of Aptagen."And if our ingredients for the brownies are too expensive, nobody will buy them.No matter how good a drug is, it can price itself out of the market."

Aptagen's second platform is called Protein Genesis.This technology may be used to eliminate drug side effects, improve primary activity, increase or decrease half-life in the body, or create entirely new classes of proteins or enzymes.

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"There, fundamentally, what we're looking for is royalties or a chunk of product ownership when the product goes to market," Mr. Higbie told R&D Directions."As we grow, it's not our immediate plan to take any products directly to market, but instead to partner with a major pharmaceutical company that would carry out the clinical trials and ultimately be the distributor and marketer of the products."

Aptagen researchers already are developing some products using their platform technologies.Mr. Higbie says his company will look to partner them fairly early in their development to avoid competing with its collaborators in the pharmaceutical industry.

Hyseq Inc. (Nasdaq: HYSQ), based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is another tools company with a product-development agenda.

The company has developed HyChip, which managers describe as the only available universal DNA sequencing chip for diagnostic and research applications.Unlike other biochips on the market, HyChip can sequence any gene without using a specific reference gene or sequence.

Colin Higbie

President : Aptagen

Colin Higbie

President : Aptagen

By limiting the amount spent on federal funding and by not blocking private research on stem cells , Bush is leaving the stem cell research where it belongs -- with the private sector , said Colin Higbie , president of Aptagen , a Herndon , Va.-based biotech company that could benefit from stem cell research.

We believe that science that is worth pursuing can find its funding from willing and agreeable sponsors.It is inappropriate to use tax dollars for research that requires specific actions to which a significant percentage of the population is opposed , he said in a written statement.On the other hand , for such an issue it would be equally inappropriate for our government to seek to prohibit private research , especially where the benefits...are so profound..

Wei-Wu He | Colin Higbie | Diana Horvat
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COLIN HIGBIECEO, Aptagen,
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Higbie is a youngster (and already a veteran) in an industry where there just aren't many youngsters to be found.He launched his company, which does bioengineering, in 1995.
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In this climate, there are plusses and minuses: "When Internet stocks were doing very well, it was difficult for people on the investment side to put their money into anything else," Higbie says.

Wei-Wu He | Colin Higbie | Diana Horvat | NEXT
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COLIN HIGBIECEO, Aptagen,
...
Higbie is a youngster (and already a veteran) in an industry where there just aren't many youngsters to be found.He launched his company, which does bioengineering, in 1995.
...
In this climate, there are plusses and minuses: "When Internet stocks were doing very well, it was difficult for people on the investment side to put their money into anything else," Higbie says."Now biotech is looked upon very fondly, but the problems in the market have taken a lot of money out of the market, and that affects anyone who's raising money."The entire company gives off a youthful vibe that's unusual in an industry where most workers have spent their 20s getting a PhD and their 30s working in academics or government.The company's director of corporate communications, for example, is just 22 years old.That's certainly an outfit geared toward the future, not the past.