It will take five years to carry out and assess the results of the trials after which large phase three trials may be required.

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Vertex had already announced results of the first corrector and moved into a large, phase III clinical trial with the hope of moving the proteins into a place where Kalydeco could make them work better.

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Instead, Genta skipped directly to large-scale "phase-III" trials comparing Genasense to standard chemotherapy on many hundreds of patients in an all-or-nothing bet to prove the drug worked.

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Big companies are in decline because they have gone through their innovative phase and are now failing by and large to see themselves as conduits of innovation.

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Ahead of last week's ICANN meeting in Yokohama, Japan, however, controversy erupted when the group's staff proposed amending ICANN's bylaws not just to conduct the study but also to phase out the existence of the nine at-large directors within two years.

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Prof Kemp said the next phase would depend on developing much smaller fields than the large finds from the 1970s and 1980s.

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While he enjoys the early phase of building a start-up, he is less enamored of running a large company, he said.

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