This paper is part of the free Open Access archive of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

ATMP in practice: Towards a new industry landscape in tissue engineering

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ABSTRACT: Regulatory divergences and market fragmentation across member states have hampered the development of the tissue engineering industry in the EU. Addressing this situation by providing a harmonised and more predictable regulatory regime, the regulation on advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) is based on a regulatory strategy that aims to consolidate the increased activity in the domain of regenerative medicine while maintaining the pace of technical development and innovation in this area...

The Journal of Commercial Biotechnology is a unique forum for all those involved in biotechnology commercialization to present, share, and explore new ideas, latest thinking and best practices, making it an indispensable guide for those developing projects and careers within this fast moving field.

Each issue publishes peer-reviewed, authoritative, cutting-edge articles written by the leading practitioners and researchers in the field, addressing topics such as:

• Management
• Policy
• Finance
• Law
• Regulation
• Bioethics

For more information, see the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology website

Drug Patent Expirations for April 2014

The April 1 2014 issue of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology has just been published, and features the following papers:

Building biotechnology in India – Drugs are not the answer
Yali Friedman
I have had the pleasure of participating in national forums on biotechnology development in diverse countries. A common theme I see is that emerging economies wish to develop ‘a biotechnology industry like the United States.’ I generally temper these ambitions by explaining that the United States does not have a biotechnology industry per se, but rather a handful of states have very strong biotechnology concentrations and many other states are still trying to build their domestic biotechnology industries…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Fostering technology transfer in industrial biotechnology by academic spin-offs
Gunter Festel, Philipp Rittershaus
Industrial biotechnology is the commercial application of biotechnology using cells or components of cells, like enzymes, for industrial production processes including consumer goods, bioenergy and biomaterials…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Pharmaceutical R&D Productivity: The Role of Alliance
Sarah Kruse, Mark Slomiany, Rema Bitar, Sarah Jeffers, Mahmud Hassan
In recent years, the major research-intensive biopharmaceutical companies (big pharma) have come face to face with a perfect storm of eroding profit margins from blockbuster expiration and generic competition coupled with growing R&D expenses and declining advances in truly novel therapeutics…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Deciding between biobetter versus biosimilar development options based on net present value calculations
Kerstin Marie Bode-Greuel, Klaus Nickisch
AbstractThe growing share of biopharmaceuticals is paralleled by an increasing interest in biogenerics, as blockbuster biologics are approaching their patent expiries. Companies need to make decisions whether to invest in biosimilars or in biobetters with enhanced properties, the latter enabling favorable differentiation vis-à-vis the original product on the one hand and biosimilars on the other hand…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Market Orientation, Alliance Orientation, and Business Performance in the Biotechnology Industry
Grant Alexander Wilson, Jason Perepelkin, David Di Zhang, Marc-Antoine Vachon
The purpose of this study was to test the unexplored relationship between market orientation (MO), alliance orientation (AO), and business performance (PERF) in the medical/healthcare subsector of the Canadian biotechnology industry.  The study surveyed Canadian biotechnology executives via mail and web-based questionnaires…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Bioentrepreneurship Education and Training Trends
Arlen Meyers
Biomedical and health entrepreneurship continues to expand around the world. Driven by global pressures to optimize the allocation of scarce resources, life science bioentrepreneurs are creating innovative products, platforms, service and systems that deliver more value…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Where is the eBay for Intellectual Property?
Matthew B Klusas, Raymond H. Cypess, Seth Rosenfield, Adam Gerstein
This paper is an examination of the economics, organizational dynamics and structural factors inhibiting an electronic market for intellectual property.  Several intermediaries exist to facilitate the transition of intellectual property (IP) from sellers to buyers.  Over the past 20 years, a number of companies attempted to create an online “eBay for IP…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Biotech IPOs Steam Ahead in 2014
G. Steven Burrill
If you walk into most private biotech company boardrooms today, it is likely that you will hear a discussion about whether to go public. Companies at every stage of development are either getting ready to file for an initial public offering or thinking about it. Although the slowdown in new issues at the end of 2013 gave observers pause that the robust biotech IPO market of 2013 might slow down in 2014, the reality has been just the opposite…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Considerations for Start-Up Biotech Company Valuation
Walter Bratic, Justin R Blok, Megan M Gostola
The prospect of government regulation, product liability lawsuits, and customer reliance on third-party payers contribute to the complexity of valuing biotech start-ups. In addition, the inherent complexity of biologic drug manufacturing and storage creates secondary risks that must be considered in a valuation…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

Canadian Venture Capital – Unlocking the Funding Challenge
Christopher H. Jones
Canada plays a significant role in the global advancement of scientific discoveries and their translation into commercial opportunities, but is viewed as not fully realizing its commercial potential. A significant problem has been a lack of sufficient venture capital to take early-stage companies to the next level…
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

New Books
Yali Friedman
New books from the publisher of the Journal of CommercialBiotechnology
Full details at the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

The FTC is reportedly seeking $1 billion from pharmaceutical companies for the role in paying generic companies not to challenge their patents. Despite first appearances, these agreements for a generic company not to challenge a patent, called ‘reverse settlements’, may actually be good for innovation.

The rationale for reverse settlements is discussed in my textbook, Building Biotechnology, and the box “Is it worth it for generics to challenge patented drugs?” summarizes some of the financial considerations behind patent challenge.

Is it too Easy to Challenge a Patent?

Consider the case of Abilify, which had sales in excess of $6 billion last year. Under provisions the Hatch-Waxman Act, the first generic challenger to defeat a patent on a drug is eligible for 180 days of generic exclusivity. In this period, the generic tends to sell for roughly 80% of the price of the branded drug, due to there being no other alternatives.

So, the math for a generic company is pretty clear. In an ideal case, on winning a patent challenge, the generic would get 80% of the revenues (due to the lower sale price) of half the market share of the patented drug for six months, or roughly $2.4 billion dollars (I realize the math is very rough here, but it’s simply to illustrate a point). The cost of litigation may be roughly $10 million dollars (AIPLA Economic Survey). And there are stage-gates along the litigation path that enable a patent challenger to limit their legal expenses, meaning they can ‘test’ their patent challenge before committing to the full amount.

The potential for generic challengers to obtain a better-than 100-fold return-on-investment on patent litigation creates the potential for innovative firms to become mired in potentially frivolous patent litigation. While the cost for each challenger may be $10 million dollars, the innovator could face dozens of lawsuits and therefore face substantial budget drains to reactive patent protection, which would limit their ability to invest in new drug development. Accordingly, innovative firms have been paying generic companies not to challenge their drugs. This effectively changes the financial incentives for the generics. If they feel that they have a particularly strong case, then they should certainly go ahead and challenge a patent to obtain their 100-fold ROI. But if they feel that there is a chance they will not win the challenge, then obtaining a financial settlement to withdraw their challenge may be preferable.

But isn’t this anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior?

Perhaps, but consider that patents themselves are essentially tools that create temporary monopolies. The reason why the government provides these temporary monopolies is to incentivize innovation. To quote Building Biotechnology once more:

…patents provide a means by which the public can gain valuable cutting-edge scientific knowledge and abilities in exchange for a temporary grant of monopoly, which allows innovators to recoup their investments in research and development.

So, while reverse settlements, and patents, may negatively impact competition in the near-term, they are part of a large scheme which drives long-term innovation by providing temporary benefits to innovators. When these benefits expire, society as a whole wins because the innovations become freely available and normal competition can drive down prices and ensure wide-spread adoption.

What do you think? Is there a case for reverse settlements? Sound off in the comments below.

This paper is part of the free Open Access archive of the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology

A maturing industry: Strategic patenting trends, US and academic dominance, and the global biotechnology landscape

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ABSTRACT: Patent analytical data has proved itself a key enabler in measuring the commercial focus and activity taking place within highly research and development (R&D) intensive industries such as biotechnology. Marks & Clerk has assessed biotechnology patent application and grant records from a range of international patent office and proprietary databases, with a view to gauging the industry's commitment to R&D and the particular areas of biotechnology that are attracting investment...

The Journal of Commercial Biotechnology is a unique forum for all those involved in biotechnology commercialization to present, share, and explore new ideas, latest thinking and best practices, making it an indispensable guide for those developing projects and careers within this fast moving field.

Each issue publishes peer-reviewed, authoritative, cutting-edge articles written by the leading practitioners and researchers in the field, addressing topics such as:

• Management
• Policy
• Finance
• Law
• Regulation
• Bioethics

For more information, see the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology website

For those who missed the live presentation, here is the discussion of the 2014 Scientific American Worldview scorecard, featuring myself, Mike May (Worldview Editorial Director), David Brancaccio ( public radio’s Marketplace), and Caroline Rugierri (Access Life Sciences).

Some of the themes we discussed were:

• Innovation’s true “value proposition” and the ways in which investing in science has multilayered societal returns
• The biggest issues in biotech that continue to “flatten” the world and create common missions among countries
• The ever-changing landscape of international innovation and the ways government and industry can best support life science development

I hope you enjoy the preview. You can see past issues of Worldview at www.saworldview.com, and the 2014 issue will be launched at the BIO 2014 convention in San Diego.

Join me on Tuesday March 25th at 11am EST for a discussion of global biotechnology.

I will be discussing the Scientific American Worldview project along with Mike May, the project editor, and David Brancaccio, Host of NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report.

RSVP at https://plus.google.com/events/ckr9i12nbkob5ck1m6feci9bep0

2013 and 2014 have been very good for biotechnology public markets. 35 biotechnology companies went public in 2013, and well over a dozen have gone public in the first few months of 2014.

With the surge in public launches, one must ask the question: “How long can it last?”

Just a few days ago Barrons’s cautioned about a potential bubble, and as Figure 1 (courtesy of MSN Money) shows, recent drops have effectively wiped out NASDAQ biotechnology industry gains since February 1st of this year.

While this quick rise and fall of value may be sobering, long-term value investors should take some comfort in the bigger picture. The recent IPOs enabled many companies which had been sitting on the sidelines for years to raise public cash and to offer exit opportunities to investors — both of which will support future growth in the sector, and the NASDAQ biotechnology index has generally been on a tear for the past five years (Figure 2).

So, the short-term question remains — is this a short-term correction, a closing of the IPO window, or the start of a larger correction?

This is a guest post from Susan K Finston, President of Finston Consulting. Do you have a response to Susan’s post? Respond in the comments section below.

Have you heard the urban legend about Egypt’s compulsory license for Viagra, following declaration of a national emergency for erectile dysfunction?  Its a whale of a tale, combining crony capitalism, low-quality generics, and a fun therapeutic category.

Just one problem – it never actually happened.

The facts are these:

• In early October 2002, the New York Times published an article highlighting the recent passage of Egypt’s new intellectual property law, including updated patent law provisions intended to bring Egypt into compliance with its World Trade Organization (WTO) patent obligations by 2005.
• The same article went on to say that an identified MOH official had issued a statement to the effect that it would soon authorize copy-cat products for Pfizer’s recently approved Viagra, noting that the patent law was not yet in place.
• As rejoinder, the NYT also quotes Egyptian IP expert (and my friend) Karem el-Helaly, who stated that while the patent amendments were not yet in place, “Viagra is entitled to data exclusivity protection under Egyptian law for five years after its market authorization.”

What does this mean?

There was no pharmaceutical compulsory licensing in Egypt – then or now.

In fact, by mid-2002 Egypt had implemented data exclusivity to protect the commercially valuable clinical dossiers lodged by companies with any application for marketing approval.  The IP Amendments included a number of lacunae and compulsory licensing provisions that gave industry heartburn, to be sure, but were passed more than 3 years ahead of the deadline.

Susan Finston’s recent post on redefining protein products has raised some debate on the regulatory status of short peptides.

What is your opinion? Should short peptides be regulated as small molecules or as biologics?

Sound off in the comments on Susan’s post.