Characterizing the Drug Development Pipeline for Precision Medicines

Amitabh Chandra, Craig Garthwaite and Ariel Dora Stern

No 24026, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Precision medicines – therapies that rely on the use of genetic, epigenetic, and protein biomarkers – create a better match between patients with specific disease subtypes and medications that are more effective for those patients. This heterogeneity in response has implications for the decision to develop therapies, their pricing, the design of clinical trials, and the relative importance of smaller biotech companies versus more traditional companies in pursuing early stage R&D. To understand the scope of these effects, we use a comprehensive database of over 130,000 global clinical trials and describe the drug development pipeline for precision medicines over the past two decades. We identify clinical trials for likely precision medicines (LPMs) as those that use one or more relevant biomarkers. We then further segment trials based on the nature of the biomarker(s) used and other trial features with economic implications. Since cancers represent a disease setting in which precision therapies are already successfully used, and since cancer applications of precision medicine are expected to grow rapidly over the coming years, we separately characterize cancer LPMs. Finally, we consider the types of firms pursuing R&D in precision medicines, considering how LPM R&D activities have evolved over recent years.

JEL-codes: I1 L5 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: EH IO PE PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Characterizing the Drug Development Pipeline for Precision Medicines , Amitabh Chandra, Craig Garthwaite, Ariel Dora Stern. in Economic Dimensions of Personalized and Precision Medicine , Berndt, Goldman, and Rowe. 2019

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24026.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Characterizing the Drug Development Pipeline for Precision Medicines (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24026

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24026

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().