6
52 Week Trading History
Overview
Caliper Technologies Corp.
("Caliper") was founded in 1995 as a
microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology
company. Caliper uses microfluidics
technology to improve, miniaturize,
integrate and automate laboratory re-
search for chemistry, biomedical re-
search, and drug discovery and devel-
opment. The goal of lab-on-a-chip
technology is to enable experiments
that ordinarily require laboratories
full of equipment and people to be
conducted on a chip small enough to
fit in the palm of a child's hand. Cur-
rently, Caliper's LabChip System ap-
plications target the pharmaceutical
industry, but eventually the company
intends to expand its technology into
areas and industries such as diagnos-
tics, agriculture and chemicals.
Valuation
The search for new drug targets
is a relentless pursuit for any drug
development company. There is a
need to introduce new drugs to the
market before sales of existing medi-
cines plateau, go off patent or face
competition. To date, approximately
five hundred targets have been identi-
fied for potential therapeutic drugs.
Over the next three years, the number
of new targets promises to increase
more than tenfold due to the recent
and continuing advances in genomics.
Genomics will provide medical re-
searchers with new drug targets; how-
ever, an abundance of new targets will
be useless if research labs are unable
to rapidly expand their research capa-
bilities to handle the increased work-
load. In the more traditional forms of
experimentation, screening is per-
formed by a number of scientists, each
using several different instruments.
This leads to the formation of many
bottlenecks, which slows progress and
ultimately put a cap on the level of
throughput that can be achieved using
traditional methods. In addition, be-
cause so many experiments are per-
formed, vast quantities of reagents are
often used during the process -- which
is very expensive. There is clearly a
need for a more productive way to
conduct drug discovery.
As laboratories of biotechnology
and pharmaceutical companies strive
to scale-up their throughput capabili-
ties while decreasing R&D costs, few
platforms have been able to meet their
needs. One revolutionary enabling
technology that delivers a high
throughput solution and offers accu-
racy and cost-effectiveness is the
miniaturized microfluidic laboratory-
on-a-chip device. This device enables
standard research lab processes to be
performed on a minute scale. Caliper
has emerged as the dominant player
in a microfluidics market where very
few players offer a competitive prod-
uct portfolio and pipeline as well as
microfluidics expertise.
In essence, the use of microflu-
idics allows researchers to perform
analytical experiments on small, inte-
grated chips. By facilitating fluid
movement through tiny channels
etched into a small plastic chip, Cali-
per's microfluidic technology allows
rapid chemical and biologic experi-
mentations to be carried out in a
miniaturized fashion. The fluid move-
ment can be potentiated using either
electrokinetic energy or a pressure/
vacuum gradient. Compared with the
more cumbersome traditional method-
ologies used today, Caliper's LabChip
technology platform allows for the
collection of digitized results in a
much shorter time. In addition, mi-
Caliper Technologies, Inc.
BioTech Sage Report, May 2001
5 2 W e e k T r a d i n g H i s t o r y
$ 1 0
$ 2 0
$ 3 0
$ 4 0
$ 5 0
$ 6 0
$ 7 0
M - 0 0
J - 0 0
J - 0 0
A - 0 0
S - 0 0
O - 0 0
N - 0 0
D - 0 0
J - 0 1
F - 0 1 M - 0 1
A - 0 1
Price
0
5 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 5 0 0 0 0 0
2 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 5 0 0 0 0 0
3 0 0 0 0 0 0
