The mammoth costs involved in producing a drug stems from the numerous processes involved. Drug discovery requires the identification of a disease, knowledge of the disease mechanism and identification of a target (point of intervention). Despite this, the rewards are tremendous, with a top-selling drug regularly exceeding billions of dollars.
The report states that drug research and development is set to take on a new level of complexity as 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 bottleneck has had a knock on effect on other industries, namely the high-throughput screening and RNAi market. The introduction of microarrays and lab-on-a-chip technologies has already revolutionized the drug discovery process with forecasts of sales set to rocket within the next 10 years.
However, the report cited the emergence of nanotechnology as an industry that is set to break through the $1 trillion mark. The progress this sector has achieved promises to exponentially increase even the volume of microarrays by working at a level far smaller than conventional microarrays. The pharmaceutical market is expected to represent approximately $180 billion, with the majority of this income coming from microarrays and nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology can enhance the drug discovery process, through miniaturization, automation, speed and reliability of assays. Although at an embryonic stage of development, nano-enabled drugs are already bringing clinical benefits to thousands of patients.
Over $3 billion was spent in 2003 on nanotechnology research in the US athundreds of government, university and private centres. Continued research spending is anticipated to lead to development of $750 billion markets by 2015.
Nanotechnology products in semiconductor, energy, healthcare, materials science, and instrumentation have created existing nanotechnology markets of $499 million in 2003 with growth expected to achieve markets of $4.5 billion by 2009.
Further information on this report can be found on the research and markets website.