One more licencing deal for April 09

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.(Nasdaq:ALNY) market cap of around 800 million and Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.((Nasdaq: ISIS) market cap more than 1B announced yesterday about a new collaboration focused on developing single-stranded RNAi (ssRNAi) Under this deal Alnylam will pay licensing fess of $31M, which will be payable in the form of $11M for deal signing, $10 million after 18months or earlier in vivo preclinical studies in rodent, $5M after the studies further progress in non-human primates and atlast $5M after the beginning of Phase1 clinical trial.

ISIS is a drug discovery and Development Company and Alnylam will be funding research worth $3M each year for next three years for research development activities conducted at these two companies. If Alnylam in its own develops and commercializes their ssRNAi technology with or without a partner, Isis will receive milestones and royalties. And initially Isis is eligible to receive up to 50 percent of sublicense payments from Alnylam on Alnylam or its partnership for ssRNAi products, On the other way Alnylam is eligible to receive up to 5 percent of any sublicense payments due to Isis based on Isis’ partnering of ssRNAi products. Eventually both the companies are eligible to receive royalties from each other on any ssRNAi products developed by any of them within or with outside partnering

Invention companies ?

Patent troll term was coined in early 90's for companies who used to file patent law suits very aggressively, In 2001 this was popularized by Peter Detkin then former assistant general counsel and later went on to become vice president in Intel, it was he who first used it to describe TechSearch and their lawyer, Raymond Niro, while he was with Intel in defending a patent suit against them. Earlier it was detkin who used the term "patent extortionist" to refer to the companies who were trying to mend millions by suing Intel.

Later Peter Detkin became founders of Intellectual Ventures in late 2002, this is quite ironic as intellectual venture is one of the largest patent troll in world and detkin had described the term “Patent troll” in derogatory way while he was associated with Intel.

At present intellectual venture has started its full fledged operations in Bangalore for quite some time and has appointed ex director of IIT Mumbai for its India operations.

The question is these companies investing on invention or rather filling their own pockets?

17 billion KPO cake , is it possible ?

Sometime back I was conducting a survey for overall KPO industry in India and I was astonished by the numbers especially KPO’s (Knowledge process outsourcing) in Delhi ncr and amchi mumbai.

Some govt regulatory body in india has predicted by year 2010 Indian KPO business will generate 17 billion revenue, is it possible at this hr to dream that much? As many of the small kpo's have vanished and some which had earlier done mass recruitment are laying of their employees :(

Is the KPO industry stable?