Kaplan in New Biz Week Column: Re-Direct Biotech Toward Healthcare Transformation

Melissa Withers
July 29, 2009

The national health-care debate is many things to many business interests. To the biotech industry, it seems to be a matter of life and death.  Makers of biotech drugs, which are derived by manipulating genetic material in living organisms, insist that their products must be patent-protected from generic "biosimilars" for at least 12 years. That would ensure monopoly prices, which the industry says are required to earn back their big investments in research and development.

To reform the U.S. health-care system, the government shouldn't be creating a road map to biosimilars, however long the trip. Instead, it should open the floodgate to "biodissimilars" and to the personalized medicine options they will enable.

Biotech is a great U.S. innovation success story with the potential to be the disruptive force that makes personalized medicine possible. Personalized medicine creates remedies designed for your specific genetic makeup or condition and offers a path toward better, longer lives, and lower health-care costs. Unfortunately, the biotech industry has moved away from its disruptive potential and morphed into Big Pharma, adopting the pharmaceutical industry's unsustainable "blockbuster or bust" business model.

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