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Commercializing Rare Disease Therapies Is Getting Tougher

 
• By Jane Barlow, Roger Longman, and Rob O'Brien

For an industry increasingly dominated by these drugs, commercial programs need to take on the risk once reserved for development.  

Things are getting tougher
Rare disease therapies are becoming more difficult to commercialize • Source: Shutterstock

Historically, if you were to pick a symbolic hero of the drug industry’s rise to prominence it might be Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin; Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine; or maybe the Nobel prize winners James Black, who developed the first beta-blocker and H2 antagonist; or Gertrude Elion, who catalyzed the development of antivirals. Their discoveries, after all, resulted in medicines that successfully treated millions of heretofore untreatable patients.

Today’s hero, on the other hand, would be Henri Termeer, the late CEO of Sanofi Genzyme and the...

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