Replies to post #117978 on Biotech Values

[jq1234]

When PhRMA released its first accounting of medicines in development for cancer in 1988, only 65 were recorded. The numbers over the next decade grew gradually. As recently as 2005, there were fewer than 400 medicines in development for cancer.

Wow!

While I knew number of cancer drugs in clinical trials increased dramatically the last 5 years based on personal obeservation, it's still good to have actual number backing it up.

As I mentioned in message (#115523), this was the major contributing factor to the dramatic decline of overall drug development success rate.

I believe drug development area goes through cycles. Everyone is getting into oncology in recent years. However, unless success rate goes up dramatically - via personalized (biomarker) route - the current trend is not sustainable.

[biomaven0]

the number of such drug candidates has continued to spiral higher, and hence the chance of commercial success for any arbitrary candidate has gone down. In short, there continue to be too many cancer-drug candidates chasing too few reimbursement dollars.

Surely the same can be said of HCV drugs - in that space there will be only a handful of ultimate winners, while in oncology there will likely be several dozen.

Peter