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CSO • Food for Thought
I encourage interested Sangamo shareholders to check out a recently published piece in Seeking Alpha—“Biotech Investors Should Read Bibliographies Of Chief Scientific Officers”—a general reflection on the publication record of a biotech company's CSO as it relates to his or her company’s performance. Although the author (wisely) admits that there is not a necessary causal relationship between publication quality and quantity and a given company’s bottom line, s/he does draw upon interesting anecdotal evidence, including the outstanding publishing record of various CSO’s and correlative success of companies (like $REGN, up tenfold in the last five or six years). Former Sangamo CSO Philip D. Gregory (now with bluebird bio) is featured rather prominently in the article, though the author is not as well acquainted with Dr. Gregory’s work as we are: “BLUE recently announced a new CSO whose name I immediately put into Google Scholar, unchecking the boxes for citations and patents. "Philip D. Gregory" turned up 321 hits, the 1st 20 of which are all co-authorships in the highly prestigious journals Nature, Cell, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. I found eight 1st authorships, all from 1998-2001, earlier in his career which shows the natural progression from being a 1st author as a junior investigator to being a co-author at a later stage of career development. All these articles are related to gene editing, mostly with zinc-finger nucleases which is his field of expertise, and which became the platform of Sangamo (NASDAQ:SGMO).” To the extent that the author’s thesis is persuasive (and admittedly there are a number of excellent arguments in rebuttal), it is easy to take heart in the fact that Sangamo has a host of scientists whose publications, like Gregory’s (often co-authored with him), are of the highest stamp. Any company would be lucky to have the likes of Holmes, Urnov, Rebar, Miller, Cost, Reik, Zhang, Lee, and the younger set of Wechsler, Li, Conway, and a slew of others at their company. The fact is that many of the names in the list above have distinguished publishing records ( http://investor.sangamo.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=864237 ) that would be the envy of a biotech firm. Perhaps I am being overly idealistic, but I have to believe that with the weight of talent at Sangamo, it is not surprising that no new CSO has been named. How to pick from such a group? Assuming that a new CSO is named sometime soon—whether elevated from within or hired from without—s/he will be leading an impressive team. |
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