Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Executive Vice President, Development and Product Operations, and Chief Medical Officer, Genentech, Inc. (South San Francisco)

David Kessler, Dean, School of Medicine, Yale University (New Haven, CT)

Richard Klausner, Senior Fellow and Special Advisor to the National Academies of Science; Former Director, National Cancer Institute (Washington, DC)

Gerald Levey, Provost and Dean, University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine

Robert Topel, Isidore Brown & Gladys J. Brown Professor in Urban and Labor Economics, University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business

Moderator:

Jay Moorin, Partner, ProQuest Investments (Princeton, NJ)

Summary:

The biotechnology panel tackled an array of issues ranging from basic research to expectations of both the public and investment community. The main theme of the discussion was exploring the possibility of reaching a healthy medium between the investment community, public opinion and the needs of those actually conducting biotechnological, medical, and pharmaceutical research.

The panel opened with a discussion focused on the panelists′ positions on various issues. Susan Desmond-Hellman feels strongly that medical research can be turned into products more often than not. David Kessler stated that it is becoming more and more difficult to perform clinical research due to the lack of quality of clinical trial experts as well as to the inherent inefficiency of the procedures performed today. Richard Klausner believes that cancer research would be far more advanced were it not three to four times underfunded. Gerald Levey feels that in order for many drugs to reach larger markets, healthcare needs to be reevaluated stating, "healthcare in this country is in deep trouble." Robert Topel was primarily concerned with capturing and measuring the economic value of biotechnological advances as well as with extending patent protection in order to create incentives for pharmaceutical companies.

The drug creation process — basic research, development, clinical trials, regulatory approval and commercialization — takes up to fifteen years to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The discussion touched upon what can be done by the FDA to expedite this process since over the last few years the time of approval by the FDA has increased while the number of drugs being approved has dropped off slightly.

A popular topic of discussion was the issue of the expectations generated by the completion of the Human Genome Project and the notion that its completion did not automatically lead to a transformation of medicine. At best, they opined, we are at the partial information stage. According to Richard Klausner, we must all understand the clear difference between a scientific versus a medical breakthrough. The significance of the completion of the Human Genome Project is synonymous with the transformation from gathering information to making sense of it. Making sense of the information is going to take much longer than people realize. "It is almost like being handed a book in a completely different language and asked to understand and interpret it," said Klausner.

The second most popular topic of discussion centered on the financial aspect of the biotechnology industry. Jay Moorin, moderating the panel, raised the question of whether or not $43 billion in research and development in the biotechnology industry is enough money. Professor Topel considers it not an issue of whether any given amount is enough but rather how much people are willing to pay for the possibilities and potential of the research being financed. Topel believes that the multiple created between the cost and benefit of medical research is grand. What is to be done about astronomical profits reaching an excess of 75% at times? How and when is this phenomenon going to be regulated? A problem, according to Topel, is the failure of basic medical research to capture any economic benefit. Financial constraints limit the opportunity for creative biotechnological, medical and pharmaceutical research to take place in our universities and research institutions. Much of this potentially groundbreaking research fails to advance from thought to practice.

Among other topics discussed were issues dealing with therapeutics versus diagnostics, the lack of measuring analysis, the role of the FDA, and the troubling trend of the biotech industry to get caught up in political debates.

Background Info:
2001 Global Conference Biotechnology panel summary
2001 Global Conference Nobel laureates in Medicine panel summary
2000 Global Conference Medical Research panel summary
Milken Institute Review article
Milken Institute Review article
Milken Institute Review article

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