Re:The Rise Of The Gentleman Hacker
by bioh42_2 on Friday December 03, 2010 @04:09PM
(#1967442)
I don't need convicing that it is easy to inovate outside of big pharma. Altough bioinformatics startups do require quite a bit more cash then pure software startups.
However, the biggest part of capturing value is the regulatory burden.
In other words, lets say you have a great way to discover biomarkers. Even more so, you go ahead and DO discover a pile of biomarkers with great potential.
Then you attemp to sell those biomarkers to big pharma, and that is when you find out:
Even with all their beurocracy and horrible return on R&D investments, big pharma is sitting on a huge pile of biomarkers.
Pushing any one tratment through the pipeline costs a metric tonne of cash and takes 10 year before you even know if it's worth to keep going.
That is why there's a huge backlog of potential drugs, biomarkers, treatments, etc.
Thus merely finding new things with potential is only slighlty better then nothing.
However, the biggest part of capturing value is the regulatory burden.
In other words, lets say you have a great way to discover biomarkers. Even more so, you go ahead and DO discover a pile of biomarkers with great potential.
Then you attemp to sell those biomarkers to big pharma, and that is when you find out:
Even with all their beurocracy and horrible return on R&D investments, big pharma is sitting on a huge pile of biomarkers.
Pushing any one tratment through the pipeline costs a metric tonne of cash and takes 10 year before you even know if it's worth to keep going.
That is why there's a huge backlog of potential drugs, biomarkers, treatments, etc.
Thus merely finding new things with potential is only slighlty better then nothing.