As the biopharmaceutical industry faces declining productivity and innovation, personalized medicine—the concept that a person’s genetic makeup could be used to tailor medical care to that individual’s needs—offers promise for increasing economic returns, according to “Assessing Risk and Return: Personalized Medicine Development & New Innovation Paradigm.”
The paper’s authors contend that industry stakeholders must be open to unique models that could reduce the risks of current drug development processes and increase their combined probabilities of success. This will be necessary to reverse the trend of declining productivity and innovation, and embrace new technological and scientific advances that will allow for safer and more effective treatment of diseases through personalized medicine.
The Kauffman Foundation paper suggests that collaborating with nonprofit disease-focused organizations not only would help bridge some of the funding gaps in early-stage discovery and development of new technologies, but, more importantly, would create efficiencies that generate increased economic returns for the personalized medicine sector. These collaborations—and the de-risking strategies they provide in terms of time and costs—could prove to be an important model for the sector’s further development and growth.
Such a model would include nonprofit disease foundations or other collaborating organizations establishing and managing the programmatic research of networks of academics and investigators from small biotechnology companies, patient registries and expert clinical centers. In return, large biopharmaceutical companies would commit to providing some funding and to assuming late-stage development of “de-risked” drugs, taking them to the approval and marketing stages.
