$10 Billion Deal, page-170

The language around the eradicationand the need to cure Hepatitis B is quite similar to the language around HIVbut quite a different approach.  As it happens we do have a programme, adrug development programme, that targets Hepatitis B.  It’s at a muchearlier stage, it’s still in the pre-clinical term which means that we’re stillin the process of characterising how our drugs are working, coming up with alead compound that we can take forward into first gen manned studies. It’s been quite interesting becausethe way that our drugs work and how we design drugs is we’re targeting aparticular class of protein that’s found in a broad range of viruses, it’sfound in HIV, it’s found in Hepatitis C, it looks like it’s present inHepatitis B, it’s in influenza, a few viruses that cause some of therespiratory viruses and our speciality and what our expertise is in designingdrugs that target this particular type of protein found in all of thesedifferent viruses.  Whether they have a reservoir or not is not really thekey part of our story, the main thing is does that virus have this particularprotein that we can target with our drugs.
Our main focus now is on finding acommercial partner for the HIV programme. 
While we are designing what thenext trial would look like we at this point do not anticipate running thattrial ourselves, we would like to have one of the big pharma in there with usfunding that and developing it in parallel, that’s really our primefocus.  Certainly, having a bit more money in the bank from the exerciseof these options puts us in a reasonably strong position to get to thatnegotiation period.  We still are doing some additional work, inparticular with Hepatitis C to identify a need and to progress that, a reallyfascinating and really very valuable programme that we’ve not really spent alot of money on to date as we’ve been focussed on our lead programme, but it’sin the interest of shareholders for us to really add some additional value insome of these early stage programmes because there is a possibility of earlystage deals for things like Hepatitis B.In fact, just recently I think in thelast two or three weeks Johnson & Johnson did a deal with a US listedcompany, Arrowhead, for their Hepatitis B programme which was in phase 1/2A andI think that that was quite a significant deal, I don’t have the numbersstraight in front of me but it was in the order of maybe $1.7 billion or morefor them to work together on that.  There’s quite a bit of money even inthese early stage anti-viral programmes if you can find the right drug at theright stage and find the right partner and ideally have more than one want you,then you can get a good return for your shareholders.