Biotech Social Contract Vies With Business Mandate
George Miller
May 6, 2007-If biotech has a social contract to innovate, it also has a business contract to remain a viable industry.
Such is the conclusion to be drawn from industry experts speaking at the 2007 Biotechnology Industry Organization show in Boston. Two panel discussions-one on perceptions of the technology and the other on providing drugs to the developing world-conducted on the opening day of the conference show just how far biotech has come as a business and how high it sets the bar for its worldwide social responsibility.
"In biotech research, we have a social contract to innovate," said James Mullen, chief executive at biopharmaceutical maker Biogen Idec.
Mullen's comment came during a presentation of survey results that compared perceptions of biotech industry leaders with those of the United States voting public on the role and contribution of biotechnology in healthcare, agricultural, energy and environmental applications.
The public opinion studies were conducted last month by national pollsters Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research on behalf of BIO. To permit comparisons, the surveys targeted the industry leader and the U.S. voter groups separately.
Eighty percent of voter respondents indicated that patient access to new biotech treatments in public health care is a positive development for the reduction in human pain and suffering that it can provide.
On the industry leader side, 79 percent of those surveyed said they are optimistic that the biotech industry will continue to develop new therapeutics and products to help address global needs in health care, agriculture, energy and the environment.
"It's remarkable how aligned [the two groups are]," said Mullen.
In the study, U.S. voters rated the importance of finding cures to diseases as a top national issue, ahead of the war on terrorism and dealing with illegal immigration, according to researchers.
Both industry leaders and voters expressed high levels of optimism about the industry's potential for finding cures for serious diseases: 94 percent of industry leaders said they were optimistic, compared to 86 percent of voters.
But the potential to find cures and the ability to build successful businesses that do so for both the developed and the developing world has proved challenging, due in part to the inherent difficulties of drug discovery but perhaps more to the staggering costs of clinical trials to prove the safety and efficacy of new drugs. Clinical development costs have made venture capitalists wither, stranding some promising biopharmaceutical start-ups on the edge of biotech's product development valley of death.
"[Biotech] has got to move beyond a social contract to innovate to a viable business opportunity," said Christopher Earl, President and CEO at BIO Ventures for Global Health, who led a discussion on harnessing biotech innovation to improve the global health pipeline.
"It's about business strategies, not about donations, although not-for-profit organizations and foundations play an important role" in providing needed drugs to the developing world, said Earl. A billion people in the developed world can afford quality health care, he said, but 5.5 billion people in the developing world can't. Bacteria, worms, and viruses remain big health challenges to developing countries.
He outlined existing and evolving market-based approaches to drug development and delivery on a global scale. "The best incentive is a real market," he said, and described both push and pull market mechanisms.
On the push side are government grants to develop and purchase drugs, and contracts for drug stockpiles to be used in the event of pandemic or epidemic.
On the pull side is the relatively new tool of advance market commitments, in which a government or organization will supply no up-front funding but will rather guarantee its purchase of a prescribed amount of a drug that works as specified.
