Editorial

摘要

The biotechnology industry is by any definition: "risky business". Its value proposition intrinsically combines science with business, requiring continual progress in relevant science and technological capabilities throughout the tenuous innovation path from original breakthrough/premise to the registered commercial product [1]. When successful, this path may take 12 years and some $2+ Billion of investment capital in the case of biopharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, "fewer than 12% of the candidate medicines that make it into phase I clinical trials will be approved by the FDA" [2]. Distributing the costs of the failures across all attempts, every new drug which is approved by the FDA requires $4 Billion to be invested by the biotechnology industry as a whole. Some bioenterprises can absorb the economic shock, while others cannot.