By Christine Koenig
Best Practices
Canadian
Excellence in Leadership in the Life Sciences Rational drug design, target driven therapeutic approaches, biologics, individualized therapy, molecular diagnostics and biomarkers are the stateof-the-art in a new drug development area, one could think when reading the headlines, but wait – no, we are not quite there yet! But why are we progressing so slowly in bringing innovative approaches to the patients? There are a few very good reasons that can be summarized as a serious lack of smart money for early stage commercial development in Canada. • Firstly, it is true, the collective global biomedical knowledge has exploded since the beginning of the genomics area and the number of data mines (e.g. Genomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics etc.) ready to exploit is growing exponentially. But who is actually exploiting them? Well, it’s that small, early stage and chronically under funded Biotech industry. Few companies indeed eventually do find gold nuggets but most others rapidly retract to making better tools or providing research services to those who still hope, keep digging and persist. • Secondly, those who have shaped and dominated the drug development industry in the past, Big Pharma and their CROs, are spoiled by decades of success with blockbuster small molecule drugs, and have build close to no knowledge on how to develop innovative biologicals. Most Pharma giants have only very recently or not even yet recognized and accepted 24 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS JUNE 2010
how important it will be for their future survival to adopt new drug development strategies and processes (from the Biotech industry). • Thirdly, most investors are risk adverse and have burnt their fingers when the IT bubble burst and thus prefer to act as interested bystanders, hesitantly dipping their toes into the water here and there, and only jointly and slowly move forward, while seeking advice from the experts in drug development, mostly retired Pharma managers now turned into consultants.
What will it take for the Canadian Biotech industry to rise from the valley-of-death, lift off and deliver on its promise to innovate and create new and better diagnostics, therapies, and drugs? Now, there is lots of buzz about what everyone is doing (e.g. patent filings, preclinical and clinical research, tools, technologies, etc.) but little to hardly ever it is talked openly about the how and, more precisely, about how the ones (i.e. CEOs) that orchestrate those tools and systems lead, enable and perform. At Koenig & Consultants Inc.,
