We have recently been sharing with our investors the story around biomarkers and how they have moved from adolescence into a maturing and embedded aspect of clinical development and care. We can point to lots of market dynamics that signal this transformation, but there is perhaps no more compelling evidence for this being an enduring trend than the economic and societal benefits conferred by biomarker use.
At the Biomarker Summit going on in San Diego this week, Mara Aspinall, CEO of Ventana (Roche), cited data from a 2013 study by Hayashi et al. that showed biomarker use can increase average clinical trial success by over 100%. She also shared a figure adapted from a 2011 paper by Chin et al. showing examples of biomarkers dramatically shortening total drug development timelines. With clinical trials costing an average of $600k per day (and millions a day for late stage drugs), and billions in total development costs, the economic benefits of biomarker can be profound.
As a society we also benefit from these increased success rates, as biomarkers enabled (in this example) twice as many oncology drugs to reach patients that could benefit from them than would have otherwise.