Chutzpah: Millennium Takes on Diagnostics
Executive Summary
Millennium is turning its business development skills on diagnostics, promising to create a high margin business in what has been a price-cutter's paradise. Its advantage: using the discovery infrastructure built at Millennium and financed by drug companies for their deals with Millennium on drug discovery. All Millennium claims that it needs to make diagnostics pay (it hasn't for the vast majority of other diagnostics start-ups) is funding from diagnostics companies and drug firms interested in pursuing pharmacogenomics. Its major competition, the joint venture between SmithKline and Incyte called diaDexus, is skeptical that diagnostic firms, which have hitherto spent their R&D budgets on developing new instrument platforms, not the high risk hunt for new diagnostic markers, will change their tune now, and spend more on biological research than they ever have before by signing deals with Millennium. But Millennium is convinced that without the kind of new, important and expensive diagnostics it can discover with its biotech platform, such traditional diagnostic firms will continue to merely grind their profitability down in price wars.
You may also be interested in...
Biomarker Diagnostics: Place Your Bets Wisely
Biomarker diagnostics are the linchpin of personalized medicine. But building a successful business around such tests is anything but straightforward, given the complexities associated with both their development and commercialization. Today's molecular diagnostic companies need to think carefully before they choose a "go it alone" strategy when developing a particular test. It may make more sense to forge a partnership with another diagnostic company or a drug developer with the goal of sharing costs and relative risks.
The New Diagnostics Companies
A small number of start-ups are developing novel specilalty-focused diagnostics that capture drug-like revenues and margins without taking drug-like development and regulatory risks. Questions about the business model abound, since most companies need multiple tests to reach profitability and a changing regulatory climate may force these companies to seek FDA approval for their tests, dramatically increasing development risk and cost.
How Ochre Bio Bagged Boehringer For Its RNA-Based Regenerative MASH Therapies
UK-based Ochre Bio has signed its first major deal with Boehringer Ingelheim. Scrip talked to its co-founder and CEO, Jack O’Meara, about its human tissue-based drug discovery platform, its resulting RNA platform for liver disease and how the fledgling drug company's early work mirrored that seen in diagnostics.