Analysts have taken the pulse of a slate of biopharma developers and found a strong tempo behind the growing use of biomarkers in drug discovery and development.
Industry Standard Research surveyed 37 biotech and pharma companies for its study and concluded that the use of surrogate biomarkers as a substitute for traditional endpoints in clinical trials is the most widely adopted type of biomarker now in play in the industry. One of the biggest growth areas in the field will be predictive biomarkers. While a third of the companies they queried use predictive biomarkers now, 70 percent said they expected to make it a habit in the near future.
But even as some of the biggest CROs move swiftly to adopt biomarkers for their R&D work, the service group in general hasn't fully embraced biomarker analysis as a standard offering, according to a report in Outsourcing-pharma.
"One of the big issues," ISR president Kevin Olson tells the trade pub, "is that the technology is changing so rapidly that investing in a platform or hard assets is risky. Your investment might be profitable for a while or might get ‘leap-frogged' by the next generation or a scientific discovery...CROs have a difficult time balancing the desire to differentiate their service offerings by being innovators with the need to be fiscally responsible."
- check out the ISR release
- here's the story from Outsourcing-pharma