This ones a heck of a specualive investment but it seems that the institutions are willing to stomp up the cash to back it in the long term.

Heres the latest news from Killik stocbrokers on the company..........

MEDICAL MARKETING Joint Venture

We recently highlighted Medical Marketing (MMG) as worthy of attention. The company, in which I have a personal share holding, has this morning announced the formation of a joint venture, Genvax, to develop a novel DNA vaccine platform technology.

Human trials have been underway since 2001 in areas such as Lymphoma and Myeloma but the technology has broad applications in cancer, viral and bacterial infections (hence the term platform). The technology works on boosting the immune system by teaching it to identify hard to recognise cancer proteins as foreign and destroy them. Early results from the 25 patient trial in lymphoma are encouraging and evaluation of the result is expected by March 2005. Successful results should mean big pharmaceutical groups will start to take financial and commercial interests around that time.

This looks to be the first of a series of announcements due from Medical Marketing as it has a range of predominantly cancer trials moving into the clinical stage. (news flow could push the price higher)

The stock has made good progress in recent sessions up to the mid-80p level where the company is valued at just under 40 million. ENDS.

Please DYOR

cheers GF.

More good news then Mickey, itl all add up when investors get their confidence back. If we gwet today away and we have good news from Intel it will add to the better than expected inflation news in the US and we will be away again.

cheers GF.

Thanks Mickey. good post.
We crept past my last buy price today (just), showing tremendous resiliance.
But please everybody do not forget how many products this company has on trial.... this really is retirement material.
Keeping the faith...... Rob

Just recieved an email from interactive investor with Evils diary comments on MMG stating that the bosses of MMG are twits the people on the bulletin are buffoons and he remains short on MMG.He also has a pop at people who back blue sky hopefuls with no assets which did amaze me as he has stated his long position in GMC.I realise the potential of GMC but why can`t he realise the same about MMG. Who would any caring normal human being wish to succeed? a company that could create a problem with an addiction ,or one that could cure a problem.One day even the Evil one may suffer with an illness that MMG are trying to cure ,then he will wish he had backed it rather than tried to screw the company into the ground.
Sorry if i have got a bit deep and sentimental on this one but thats what happens to me sometimes when i sit on the computer with a bottle of wine .
To all MMG holders i raise my glass and give a toast to MMG future and Evils downfall.
Keep the faith
DB66

EK better hope the big C doesn't afflict himself or his family. Cancer doesn't give a flying f**k how rich you are. As gf says, he is one sick git shorting a company like MMG with the work that they are carrying out.
I was right to take my profit when I did and the dosh is still sat there waiting and itching to be re-invested but this week hasn't helped judge re-entry into MMG, bloody yanks!!, and EK still short.
Well done to all on here for sticking by the good work at MMG.

I wouldnt worry about Evil and his predictions DB he always goes well over the top just to stimulate interest and get a few numptys from advfn following him. Talking about booze Id forgoten I had one in the chiller thanks guys, see ya later.

cheers GF.

Cambridge News 19/04/2005 ....

Being a millionaire in Cambridge is getting to be a bit like being a jockey in Newmarket, it is unsurprising; yet there are still familiar figures on the business scene whose success has not been trumpeted, who have somehow managed to win the 5,000 Guineas without anyone particularly noticing.

David Best is currently worth somewhere between 35 million and 60 million - it's a moveable feast. He was already a multi-millionaire before the end of last month when the share price of his company, MMI, stretched up towards 300p, having once languished at 3p.

He is heading a company of only 12 people, and yet he is quite comfortably telling me that MMI is in a powerful position to rival the pharma giants.

"We want to stay lean and mean," he says, "fleet of foot." He goes on to point out that MMI currently has more products in clinical trials than some of the biggest names in the drugs sector.

More important, MMI has hit upon the Holy Grail, which is why the share price increased 40 per cent overnight at the end of last month when news broke about its cancer vaccine. Imagine being vaccinated against cancer, just like having a jab for polio and measles, the reality is already here.

Mr Best cuts a dapper figure. The day I go to see him at The Bioscience Innovation Centre in St John's Innovation Park, he is looking out of his office window and asking why the trees by the A14 roundabout have just been savagely felled. His outlook has been changed from leafy to bleak, a bit like the "dark satanic mills" he mentions more than once when talking about the area of Manchester where he grew up in the 1950s and 1960s.

"My father was an engineer and my mother made parachutes. Where we lived it was very Lowry-like, the north side of Manchester, the grotty bit."

He was the first in his family to go to university. A grammar school boy, he went on to study medicine at Edinburgh but after three years realised he did not want to be a doctor.

"I did not like the grand ward rounds with the consultants insulting the patients. It was just like those old Carry On films."

He switched to statistics and epidemiology, the spread of disease, and got his first job as a sales rep with Pfizer.

He spent 16 years selling drugs, moving from what is now Aventis, on to Roche in Welwyn Garden City, where he started making contact with the clever Cambridge chemists, those lighting the touch-paper of biotech. Sidney Brenner was one and Karol Sikora.

"Even in those days, in the 1980s, it was clear that the drugs pipelines were getting pretty thin. Research was in decline and there was a lot of amalgamation, I think Aventis was a grouping of about 12 companies.

"It was my job at Roche to bring in new technology from the universities, and I was incredibly lucky to find the people I did in Cambridge."

By this time he and his wife Margaret and their family had bought a modest home in a village south of the city, and by 1988 the couple had decided to start their own business, Medical Marketing International, which began life in the Bests' study before moving into St John's Innovation Centre.

Initially the business was a fee-earning consultancy, helping universities to commercialise their science by introducing them to drug companies. It was not until the mid 1990s MMI was asked to start spinning out companies, with the first, Polymasc, a spin-out from the Royal Free, floating on AIM in London in 1996.

The company, which has since been bought by a US corporation, was expected to realise a market capitalisation of 10 million, but by the end of the first day's trading, this had risen to 28 million.

"Other universities spotted what had happened and wanted us to do the same for them."

This is how MMI has developed, each time taking an equity stake for its own portfolio, and now, after years of careful nurturing, the blossoming does not look far off.

At this point Mr Best tells me how he was approached by St John's College in 1997 and asked to set up an incubator for biotech companies at the innovation park.

Prince Philip came to open it. Mr Best is one of his star Duke of Edinburgh Award winners, with Bronze, Silver and Gold, and now a world fellowship.

"He closely follows what we do, he's absolutely wonderful to us."

He reckons it was the Duke of Edinburgh Awards which gave him the skills he needed to make a success of MMI, although he also says he believes entrepreneurs are born, not made.

The Bioscience Innovation Centre provides wet lab space to start-up biotech companies in much the same way the original Innovation Centre has so successfully provided space for high tech start-ups.

This is being taken a step further with this month's opening of LabHotel, where companies will be able to rent wet labs in the way the name suggests.

For the portfolio of spin-out companies in which MMI has a stake, the emphasis is very much on cancer.

"There is a lot of unmet need. Cancer is now the biggest cause of premature death in the western world, it's overtaken heart disease."

Mr Best calls his portfolio companies "biobabies", and they are putting on weight nicely. Oncosense in Edinburgh is galloping towards a multi-billion dollar market with ruthenium-based drugs replacing platinum, which currently leads the field.

Ruthenium is dug out of the ground in Siberia as a by-product of platinum, but it has already been found to be much more powerful.

"We bring in cancer cells from Porton Down - they collect them there, cells from human tumours - and the testing is done in Cambridge. Ruthenium is four or five times more effective than platinum in fighting some tumours, and 100 times more effective against certain cancers."

Can't these new drugs be rushed through?

"Safety comes before efficacy," he says, and we both know how fatuous that would sound to someone with a tumour. These new drugs will not be on the market for three years.

But what has really got the market in a state of high frenzy over MMI is last month's announcement about the anti-cancer vaccine.

Genvax is a joint venture with Southampton University, where Prof Freda Stevenson and her team have, hopefully, hit the jackpot, although Mr Best always cautions against anything which sounds like "a cure for cancer", "it can only be in remission".

The concept of a cancer vaccine is not new, but results from other sources have not been very exciting. Prof Stevenson approached the problem in a different way.

"She asked 'What does the body really hate?' Tetanus. So, a bit of dead tetanus is injected into the body which thinks it is the real thing, so it develops all these killer cells, which stay in the blood specifically to target tetanus."

The clever bit is to put dead tetanus into cancer tumours. Those killer cells don't know the difference, yet there is nothing the body can make to fight tumours in the same way if they are not disguised as tetanus.

The big news last month was that 25 lymphoma patients who had been receiving the jabs since 2001 were all still alive, whereas it would have been expected that at least half would have died during this time.

These cancer patients have not only survived but are in complete remission, with no signs of the disease, and the only side-effects, mild flu symptoms.

Trials are now to go ahead on patients suffering from all kinds of cancer.

I ask whether the time will come when everyone will be vaccinated against cancer. Mr Best says he does not think everyone, but certainly anyone who has cancer in the family.

This new vaccine programme has already been hailed as world-leading and a "flagship technology". It is life-saving, and lucrative. We spent $420 billion last year on cancer drugs.

The world's big drug companies will pay



billions for smaller firms with just one potential blockbuster in the pipeline; so what will happen to little MMI, with its 500,000 annual turnover, its 150 million valuation on the stock market and its stunning portfolio of drug candidates?

Mr Best will not say whether or not he has been approached by interested buyers, he talks of doing licensing deals. He likes what he does, he is not aware of another business model in the world like that of MMI, it suits him and his wife.

He and Margaret live in a grand house these days, but otherwise their lifestyle has not changed. They like climbing mountains, he likes running, three times a week - there is the hint of a good torso through the shirt. Here is Biotech Man. ENDS.

cheers GF.

Nice one GF. Brings us all up to speed with the main man.

MS

Yup and an excelent start to the day up 3.5 already.

cheers GF.

What a good article GF - thanks for digging that out

Baza

Cheers Lads. Really moving on up now, Evil is in deficit on his second purchase.
Wont be long before all his lemmings are out.

cheers GF.

Not yet getting the big volume but it will come. It would pay to get in before next tuesdays meeting. We already have an idea from Mitzy that the Ruthenium results are going to be good.

cheers GF.

Added again at 194p. Hoping for a positive opening in the US.

cheers GF.

goood time to top up

where has Mitzy gone? Mitzy are you there - long time no post! ;0)

Topped up earlier on at 194p.

Standing their ground at the moment. Come on move up you devils.

cheers GF.

Buyers moving back in and price moving up. Are we in for a strong finish ?.

cheers GF.

They are doing us proud at the moment given they are fighting against the markets and Evil.
DB66

We are doing ourselves proud fighting Evil. Got in again today at 192p.

Please just stand firm.

cheers GF.