Genomics, Rare Diseases, and Disruptive Innovation in the Biopharmaceutical Industry

摘要

The multinational biopharmaceutical industry has to deal with significant financial pressures due to being a very cost-constrained and highly regulated industry. To add to that, finite patent expirations on financially successful drugs, vying nature of the biotech industry due to new innovations. There has been an increase of smaller markets due to the proliferation of molecular segmentation patient populations in fields such as personalized medicine. Particularly, due to the significant cost reducing impacts of the development of "next-generation" sequence platforms on DNA sequencing in the last decade, molecular diagnostics are being considered as cost effective candidates to be used as a standard medical test, in terms of risk assessment, confirmation of diseases, and therapeutics. Biopharmaceutical companies need to reassess their drug development strategies and choose among alternative prospective business models in order to remain relevant amid the new innovations and developments. Using a dynamic capabilities lens, this paper tends to study the impact of genomics generally and gene therapy specifically on the rare disease sector of the biopharmaceutical industry by analyzing the public data from 24 genomics based rare disease focused biopharmaceutical companies. This study shows that growing rates of cumulative returns is dependent upon the accumulation of knowledge-based employees and expanding product portfolios of disruptive genomics-based technologies for treating rare diseases. Further, this study stresses the significance of structuring the capability and capacity to absorb expertise and accrue knowledge for new product innovations and viable competitive advantage.