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With a growing need for better and more plentiful vaccines, traditional vaccine companies are responding by increasing manufacturing capacity, the biotech industry, with innovative products. Both are surely needed.
Even small biotech companies are taking more control of their product development as cash, competition, and other factors combine to bolster their negotiating power.
Most monoclonal antibodies in clinical trials are owned by small biotech companies. But with blockbuster-sized revenues and approval rates higher than those for small-molecule drugs, that all may be set to change.
The current generation of antibodies has done more than make a few companies rich. It has laid the groundwork for ambitious companies to move to maturity.
Biotech companies with business models as diverse as the products they are developing are laboring to move cell-based therapies into the clinic. Without a commercial success, however, investors will remain on the sidelines.
Biotechnology-based businesses have historically looked to venture capitalists for funding. Our recent survey shows that, unlike the public marketplace, where investors' appetite for biotechnology has waxed and waned the last few years, venture capitalists are staying the course.
Last year, public biotech companies made gains in revenues and profits, but with stock markets lackluster and regulatory issues looming, future growth remains uncertain.
Population genetics research collaborations are reaching increasingly across national boundaries to access human tissue repositories. Will discrepancies in national policies on informed consent and IP rights hinder progress?
A lesser known valuation approach for biopharmaceutical products offers project managers and out-licensing biotech companies an edge in budget and license negotiations.
States have identified biotech as an engine to economic prosperity. The obstacles for achieving success, however, especially for upstarts, may be considerable.
Genetically modified crops are often framed as the products of multinational corporations, but in poorer nations it is public research that is vibrant and attempting their development.
