From the COR board from the new "Business Week":
GOLDEN AGE." Recent weeks, for example, have seen announcements of startling advances against cancer and age-related blindness, diseases with miserable outlooks before. Cancer patients in particular have reaped rewards from biotech. A decade ago there were fewer than 10 oncology drugs in clinical trials, most of them highly toxic chemotherapies. Today over 400 cancer drugs are being tested in humans, and almost all are targeted biotech medicines designed to produce minimal side effects.
Biotechnology has finally come of age. This declaration may bring to mind the hype that has swirled around biotech so many times in the past. But a growing number of scientists and industry executives say today's enthusiasm is based on a new reality: Drugs actually exist. There are 230 medicines and related products created from biotech techniques.
Last year alone, the Food & Drug Administration approved 20 biotech drugs, among them treatments for insomnia, multiple sclerosis, severe pain, chronic kidney disease, incontinence, mouth sores, and cancer. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development estimates that at least 50 of 250 biotech drugs currently in late-stage clinical trials should win FDA approval, a success rate almost three times better than the pharma industry standard.
"We are now in a golden age of drug discovery."
TESTING IDEAS FASTER. Even long-beleaguered biotech investors have reason to be optimistic. True, biotechnology indexes have underperformed the overall market for much of the past year, and few of the 1,500 companies in this sector are profitable
Ernst & Young International estimates that nine new biotech drugs approved in 2004 will bring in total revenues of $3 billion this year. By 2007, sales of just those products should grow to $8 billion. "I would say the industry as a group will become profitable by 2008," says Dr. Mark Monane, director of biotech research at investment advisers Needham & Co.
DEBT TO ACADEMIC RESEARCHERS. There are even glimmers that the long-awaited age of personalized medicine may not be far off. Biotech companies have been skilled at coming up with innovative new drugs -- but not so good at figuring out whom they are most likely to help. Response rates for cancer drugs, for example, often are stuck at 20%.
Tired of such poor performance, pharmaceutical companies are focusing more effort on developing the diagnostic tests that would match a treatment to a patient's genetic profile, reducing side effects and increasing efficacy. "I think you are going to see a revolution in personalized medicine in just a few years," predicts Dr. George Demitri of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
"What's interesting is that it is really the academic researchers that pushed biotech forward, not corporate research and development," says Allan B. Haberman, principal of pharmaceutical consulting firm Haberman Associates in Wayland, Mass.
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