Summary
This report examines the business opportunities that are being created by nano-engineered solutions for the drug delivery market. According to one source, approximately $65 billion in drug revenues every year are accounted for by pharmaceuticals with poor bio-availability which far too often results in higher patient costs and inefficient treatment but also, more importantly, increased risks of toxicity or even death. Because nanotechnology focuses on the very small it is uniquely suited to creating systems that can better deliver drugs to tiny areas within the body. Nano-enabled drug delivery also makes it possible for drugs to permeate through cell walls, which is of critical importance to the expected growth of genetic medicine over the next few years.
Summary
Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are under immense pressures to produce a steady stream of innovative, well-differentiated drugs at reduced costs. Currently it takes an estimated 7-10 years to develop and market a drug at a cost that exceeds $800 million. In simple terms, drug discovery requires the identification of a disease, knowledge of the disease mechanism and identification of a target (point of intervention). The human genome project is expected to identify approximately 100,000 targets that will require evaluation against many compound libraries to compare gene sequences and structure. This represents a very time-consuming process and a major bottleneck in the drug discovery process as millions of compounds can be screened for each target. Novel discovery and validation technologies can expand the hit rate for promising compounds in the pipeline, and expedite their progress through to market. The introduction of microarrays and lab-on-a-chip technologies has already revolutionized the drug
discovery process. Where once it took the effort of a single chemist to view anything from one to 12 gene variations at a time, microarrays can view thousands in the same time frame. Now, nanotechnology promises to exponentially increase even the volume of microarrays by working at a level far smaller than conventional microarrays and according to one source the pharmaceutical market will represent approximately $180 billion of the forecasted $1 trillion nanotech industry.
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