Edison healthcare quarterly: It’s getting personal
Welcome to the Edison healthcare quarterly, which contains profiles of 75 companies under coverage.
The book opens with an overview of biomarker programmes within drug development by Philippa Gardner, and the challenges and opportunities these present for the pharma and biotech industry. Incorporating a biomarker programme into drug development with the aim of identifying companion diagnostics (CDx) could offer a number of advantages. These include the ability to identify patients most likely to respond to or better tolerate a given agent, potentially improving the chances of clinical success, regulatory approval and reimbursement from healthcare payers. However, it is only recently that the rate of development and regulatory approvals for targeted agent/diagnostic combinations has accelerated. Herceptin was the flagship for the CDx field and unsurprisingly, the majority of drugs with a requirement for genetic testing remain in cancer. However, biomarker development is broadening to other indications, and companies now seem to be more proactively considering biomarker development at earlier stages of development.
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