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Biotech / Medical : VD's Model Portfolio & Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: biowa who wrote (4504)	3/31/1998 5:30:00 PM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9719

Biowa: <<the big evolution in biotech/pharma going into the next millennium is going to be the economization and acceleration of lead and clinical development efforts>> There's some relevant info from the biotech issue of The Economist a few months back. They had a graph of development cost by stage of drug development. I was kind of surprised by what they showed. I had always thought that the clinical trials period was the expensive one, but their graph had two peaks, the first at the stages _before_ trials. Their graph had Phase I/II trials as the trough in the graph between the more expensive lead/optimization stuff and the Phase III trials. Let's imagine a world in which lead generation/optimization is cheap. Who gets helped? Who gets hurt? One result may be many more imitators more quickly for any new drug. That might mean drug companies might end up being hurt by this development, not helped (the analogy is to shorter product cycles in the high-tech world). How about the balance of power between big pharma and the biotechs? If drug development becomes more routinized, this may help the big guys who might no longer need the "inspiration" part of the equation as much. Interesting topic. Peter