Developing Therapies to Treat Aging is No Less Challenging than Other Areas of Biotech

The biotech industry experiences a high failure rate, if we wish to define failure as failing to achieve the original goals of the research program that gave rise to a company. The article noted here opens with many examples to give a sense of the prevalence of companies in the early aging-focused space that altered their course to give a return to their investors by other means, after it proved too challenging to achieve the original vision. This is par for the course: the development of novel medical biotechnology is both very difficult and highly regulated. The grail of producing new medicine that is accepted by the regulatory community is a rare success, but it is also true that there are other paths to generating some progress from programs that fail to achieve that goal. The different strategies that past companies followed are common answers to the same constraint: there is no regulatory pathway to bring geroprotectors the market. So they either: (a) Develop pre-clinical assets and platform that may have value for other pharmaceutical and biotech companies. (b) Commit to the traditional biotech playbook and treat an age-related disease through a drug that targets a specific pathway or mechanism of aging, collect data to support claims for other indications and expand the label of the medicine over time. (c) Commercialise unproven products (supplements) or experimental treatments (gene therapies) in jurisdictions where the regulatory environments may allow such...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs