Satellite communications, biotech drugs, and a few other industries have very high upfront costs.
Amgen says it's impossible to make exact copies of biotech drugs and opposes automatic substitution.
The pickings are good, he says, with more experimental biotech drugs in late-stage human testing than ever before.
The deal will bolster revenue as Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Biocon's ambitious boss, continues to invest in new biotech drugs.
But biotech drugs are hard-to-make proteins that will require their own clinical trials.
Even biotech drugs, which are synthetic versions of natural proteins, may face copycats.
These biotech drugs, all of which must be injected, work by binding to a molecule called the tumor necrosis factor.
Generic versions of biotech drugs like the ones Genzyme sells are never going to create this kind of sudden competition.
Most biotech drugs are largish protein molecules that have to be injected because otherwise they would be destroyed by stomach acids.
Instead of medicines made from small, easy-to-manufacture molecules, biotech drugs were proteins or antibodies--big messy molecules of the kind found in our bodies.
Alain Herrera , head of Sanofi-Aventis' oncology franchise, says he doesn't feel threatened by the flood of new targeted biotech drugs being used to treat cancer.
The acquisition will give Pfizer a much larger presence in areas where it has been viewed as weaker than the competition, namely biotech drugs and vaccines.
On Monday Allergan (nyse: AGN - news - people ) unveiled results showing that a pill derived from vitamin A might be nearly as effective as some of the biotech drugs.
Pfizer, Merck and Novartis have all said they intend to make a business of selling copycats of biotech drugs, protein medicines that have only been a force in medicine for a little over two decades.
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The goal is to move from having to merely tweak the proteins that are used as biotech drugs to being able to design them, even taking material from multiple organisms and using them to create new, functional genes.
Some big-selling biotech drugs are proteins themselves: Amgen's (nyse: AMGN - news - people) Epogen, Immunex's (nasdaq: IMNX - news - people) Enbrel and Genzyme's (nasdaq: GENZ - news - people) Cerezyme, for example.
While other pharmaceutical companies have paid large amounts of cash for biotech drugs that had nearly completed human testing, Roche (otc: RHHBY - news - people ) has been sticking mostly to those that are in the earliest (phase I) or middle (phase II) stages of clinical trials.
Think of them as generic versions of biotech protein drugs, except, unlike traditional pills, these medicines are tough and complicated to make.
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is testing 18 drugs with biotech companies.
The therapies, it's just like finance and the markets went past the regulators, and drugs are biotech are going past the regulators.
The biotech industry creates new drugs by making tweaks to natural proteins.
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Its homegrown pipeline of new drugs is rather thin, and competition to fill these gaps with drugs from biotech firms is fierce.
In this case, the DNA was constructed for Microbia , another Cambridge biotech that is developing drugs and creating microbes that can be used in manufacturing chemicals.
Some industry observers have said that Big Pharma firms should try to more actively license drugs from smaller companies and biotech outfits in order to fill out their pipelines of experimental drugs.
Now, the biggest stand-alone cancer biotech company will sell mostly drugs whose basic formulations were made decades ago.
Last year he quit his secure job at Pharmacia (nyse: PHA - news - people ) to lead research at a no-name biotech shop working on antifungal drugs.
Taking aim at diabetes, arthritis, lupus, obesity and cancer, the biotech house now has 40 drugs in preclinical or patient trials, more than at any time in the company's history and up from only 22 during the entire 1990s.
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