Views on the Industry

Biotech

Moving on from the Enterprise Computing world, a world in which I have been living in lately is the Biotech market. If all you were to read was the basics from the media, one would assume that this is a deeply troubled industry, from Vioxx to VC-less funding. This is not so. The Pharmaceuticals are in deep trouble if you want to find an industry with $20+ Billion in profits, due to their lack of competitiveness of R&D spending, but the Biotechs are a good place to put money. Why so? There are many of them and they have found how to specialize in markets that they have expertise. Only certain large companies can stay strong through generations of market change (I think of Amway and Pfizer), and this is because they all like to get nice and big on fat patent profits. Soon those patents become the lifeblood for eveything, and 17 years certainly seems like a long time. In the course of today's Bioscience, it is something of an extended timeframe, but patents are still coming due. This makes the ability to count on fat profits somewhat untenable for the near future for some of the most successful companies. What Biotech brings is the diversity of offerings, and the network of relationships throughout the industry, and a sustainable R&D pipeline by nature of the speciailization. This may seem counter-intuitive, and it is true there will be many, many Biotechs that will not get their products to market because they won't get them through the FDA toll-gate. But the ones that do get through and leverage success in to future successes have just as good a chance at revolutionizing the delivery of medicine as any Pharma or other delivery model for health care. Only 10% of all health care spending is spent on prescription medicines, with much room to grow. If one is looking for an area akin to the go-go internet days but with actual merit, the Biotechs are as good as any, and that is what every state economy could use, a dose of Biotech medicine.

posted by douglas dooley @ 4:44 PM