Liste Newsletter

Index Performances
EPITEX, EPITA’S INDEX, Nov. 6, 2003: 88.36 Combined share value in EPITEX: $571.92 (EPITEX set at 100 on Aug. 31, 2001)

News

MARKET FOCUS

U.S. equities added strong gains on Thursday, cheered by good new son the labor front ahead of the employment report for October and robust financial results from Cisco Systems.

Weekly claims for unemployment benefits fell 43,000 to 348,000, and the four-week moving average fell to 380,000, the lowest level since the latest recession began in March 2001. Investors were pleased that claims continue to move further away from the 400,000 level that signals a contraction in the labor market.

The weekly data compounded the impact of rising readings in the ISM indexes for the services sector and the manufacturing sector earlier this week. Also, productivity jumped by more than 8 percent in the latest quarter.

In the IT space, Cisco Systems was a winner after handily topping forecasts for earnings of 15 cents a share on $4.86-billino sales. Instead, Cisco reported profits of 17 cents a share, excluding one-time items, on revenue of $5.1 billion, up 8.5 percent sequentially.

OUTLOOK

The main market-mover is due out on Friday, with payrolls expected to have added 40,000 jobs in October following a gain of 57,000 in September. The jobless rate is seen unchanged at 6.1 percent.

Pixar Animation should contribute to a firm market tone after reporting profits of $13.2 million or 23 cents a share on revenues of $30.2 million. The studio created blockbuster movie Finding Nemo, which grossed $424 million this summer.

THE NUMBERS

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 36 points, or 0.4 percent, to 9,856. The Nasdaq Composite Index added 17 points to 1,976, while the Nasdaq-100 index of large-capitalization tech and biotech stocks ended up 0.7 percent at 1,440.

Profile

The International Symposium on Laboratory Automation and Robotics (ISLAR), recently held in Boston, Mass., was highlighted by significant advancements in applied automation in life sciences.

Attending and presenting companies at ISLAR included Amgen, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, AstraZenaca Pharmaceuticals LP, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Bristol Myers Squibb, Caliper Technologies, Eli Lilly & Co, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson PRD, Merck and Co. Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Wyeth Ayerst, and Novartis Pharma AG.

“The field of microfluidics holds vast promise which is just starting to be tapped,” stated Ching-Hua Tseng, Senior Research Scientist of Pfizer Inc.

“We have evaluated Caliper’s LabChip system for use with cell-based calcium flux assays and found it to be reliable for high throughput screening. The difference from traditional assay methods has been lower false-positive rates for the Caliper chip and the ability of the miniaturized format to reduce cell usage by a factor of 100 to 200, enabling high throughout screens for cell lines that are slow growing or are difficult to scale up.

Other presenters also discussed how Caliper’s LabChip technology produces exceptionally reproducible and meaningful data for high throughput screening, while, at the same time, enabling significant savings in reagent costs and assay development resource requirements.

A user presented data demonstrating cost savings of millions of dollars in just one high throughput screen enabled by Caliper’s LapChip technology that allowed the use of approximately 1/5th of the enzyme and 1/100th of the substrate usually needed in experimentation.

“The powerful impact that microfluidic technologies has had on the screening efforts of leading companies is a strong indication that our industry is at the dawn of a new period of significant progress in drug discovery. Many industry leaders testified to the exquisite data that helped them make better, earlier lead optimization decisions, and eliminate false positives and false negatives,” said Kevin Hrusovsky, CEO of Caliper, who also sits on the board of the Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA).