Biopharmaceuticals

Biopharmaceuticals, or Biotech drugs are defined as any substance produced by natural organisms or recombinant techniques consisting of proteins and other products derived from living organisms for the treatment or management of diseases or injuries. These treatments are created through fermentation, recombinant DNA technology, and other bioprocesses.

It is common wisdom that in the current pharmaceutical market, the true action is in biologics.

In traditional pharmaceuticals, the pipeline is struggling to produce strong therapies and the growing number of drugs losing patent protection will more than offset revenues generated from new developments. For now, its fair to say the biopharmaceutical market is spared the impact of this setback as the path to generic or biosimilar development is more involved and the number of biopharmaceutical drugs facing generic competition remains limited.

Because of the nature of these therapies they will face generic threats in some areas, but not in the same magnitude as traditional therapies, thus a greater amount of information is needed to understand the market dynamics for each product. They are complex to make and thus the number of companies in the market is smaller – though competition is growing. This creates a need to keep track of research and development in the market for these therapies and for the equipment required to manufacture and process biopharmaceuticals at various stages.