For all the innovations they promise in a drug industry with me-too products, the fact remains that contemporary drug discovery technologies increase the time required to produce a new drug. In genomics, companies now pursue their own targets, looking to create as much intellectual property around them as possible. They thereby keep their competitors away from the field--but they also lose their help.

A number of genomics firms, attempting to capitalize on both the consumer movement and the power of genetics to create a personalized approach to health care, are trying to create consumer businesses. The two nearest-term opportunities are in aggregating pre-stratified, genotyped patients for clinical trials, often by teaming up with consumer health web sites; and providing pharmacogenetic tests of certain well-known drug metabolism variants. But the players face major hurdles not merely in coming up with proprietary tests, but in getting around ethical, privacy, and reimbursement issues specifically related to genetics, as well as in the potential problem of alienating physicians. At the same time, paradoxically, the consumer may offer the best route to preparing a market for genomic testing, which is likely to be resisted by much of the medical establishment.

When the market returns to steady-state, following its current valuation gyrations, we'd like to see biotechs answer three basic questions. Who will be the new financiers of the biotech industry--investors or pharma? How will biotechs show they can increase their market value at competitive rates off already high valuations? How will the biotech industry handle its public image--particularly as genomics becomes a consumer issue?

While gene sequencing and gene expression technologies have become relatively industrialized, genetic analysis is a time-consuming, labor intensive, and rate-limiting step in drug discovery. Kiva Genetics hopes to remove this bottleneck with a high-throughput system that miniaturizes and automates genotyping.