anoir - i don't think that i was clear enough as you have not...

anoir - i don't think that i was clear enough as you have not quite gotten my point.

i do not see genera as a competitor of PLT at all.. . . except in a very indirect sense.

Genera has a test for HPV that looks to be very very good from a commercialisation perspective - otherwise sonic would not have partnered with them.

The HPV test that Genera has essentially takes the smear sample that is gathered at the time of the Paptest, and tests the sample for HPV. at present the market for this test is mostly in the USA, where they have a pretty standard practice of doing full HPV testing on women whose pap smears show abnormal cells. Genera's test is a clear competitor to Digene - and also to a couple of other emerging tests such as the one from Roche and the one that Third Wave are seeking to market.

PLT is very different. Truscreen is an ALTERNATIVE to pap that is aimed at the second world at present as it is very cost effective compared with pap testing . .. .which is not widely practiced at present in most of the markets that PLT is targetting. That is why i say that PLT has to change medical practice. . . .in order to get high volume usage of Truscreen they first need to persuade the administrators/doctors that widespread testing for cervical abnormalities is itself a good thing.

As for Cerviscreen - it is really two "products" rolled into one service. The first "product" is the self sampling device. It appears to be unique and proprietary to PLT. However, once the sample taken with the cerviscreen device has been shipped back to the path lab then the lab needs to do a test on it. Now - that test COULD BE the Digene test, or the Roche test, or possibly the Genera test. . . . but no. . .. PLT claims that it has its own test. All i am saying is that a) we don't actually know very much about the PLT test and how good it is in practice, and b) PLT has not indicated at all that it intends to try to sell its test to third parties outside of the cerviscreen process which is interesting, and c) Genera's test is in one sense a "competitor" to this back-end of the cerviscreen test.

However - the reason why I say that PLT has to change medical practice to make a success of Cerviscreen is because the pap method of sampling is the industry standard at present. . . . and is consistent with Genera test. However, PLT's first challenge with cerviscreen is to get doctors/patients to move away from pap sampling and instead to use the cerviscreen self-sampler.

You are correct that if PLT succeeded in taking the entire market away from Pap and to Cerviscreen instead, and if the pLT HPV test were then sold to Path labs essentially as a bundled product with the Cerviscreen sample. . . that this would put Genera AND Digene AND Roche out of business in this product area. But I do not think that this is likely.

And in a broader sense, I think that the Genera and PLT business plans / ways of attacking the market are sufficiently dissimilar that one being 12/24 months in front of the other is of very little consequence.

Sorry to ramble. Have to go to a party with the girlfriend now.