By Roger Longman
It is not a good time to be selling the virtues of technologies.
The first annual rEvolution Symposium of top research execs didn't solve the R&D productivity problem, but it went some way towards examining how the industry has gotten itself into it. Most of the big-money technologies of the '90s have not increased the productivity of pharmaceutical R&D, both because they address less significant problems, in particular missing predictive toxicology, and because they've been mismanaged and misused. Moreover, because of the industry's 10-year product cycle time, many technology purveyors have had to overpromise in order to create buying interest that will in turn create returns for investors with much shorter time horizons; some technologies useful for research have been forced before their time to try to serve as the basis for drug creation. Two major areas to focus on: accountability and inter-company cooperation. On the former, the R&D chiefs want to apply to large organizations the kind of accountability intrinsic to small companies. On the latter: no company can solve the basic science problems alone--dealmaking, including consortia, are a necessity. The movement towards decentralization and inter-company cooperation is likely to lead to the disaggregation of the industry's research efforts--and a boon for productive biotechs, granted they can hold on through this time when their models are financially unsustainable.
By Roger Longman
It is not a good time to be selling the virtues of technologies.
Many assets do not meet their pre-launch predictions, either exceeding or falling short of their forecast sales. In this article, In Vivo highlights several historic examples and the factors that influenced their unexpected performance.
In Vivo spoke with Edward Ahn, CEO of Medipost, a Korean company that has developed stem cell therapies from cord blood, on how they are working across regulatory markets to provide a novel treatment for degenerative diseases.
Leading industry experts have spoken to In Vivo about how investment, a change in mindset and a fresh approach to policy may allow Italy to kick-start its biotech ecosystem.