We have been going through the exercise of trying to figure out how many research professionals there are in drug and diagnostics companies whose job it is to track and utilize information about biomarkers. In so doing we discovered a significant and interesting correlation.
Those companies that have a higher percentage of employees with biomarker experience and responsibilities have overall higher gross revenue per employee.
We analyzed the top 10 drug and diagnostics companies and found that they have an average of 225 people per company in senior roles (VP, Director, or Sr Manager) with biomarker-related experience and/or responsibilities, which equates to an average of 0.5% of the total workforce (the average number of employees in this group is 63,000 per company).
Gilead and Amgen both stood out in the sample for having over double the average number of biomarker professionals, and for significantly higher revenue per employee, but the correlation was quite strong across the entire sample (correlation coefficient = 0.8).