Precision Medicine Innovation Not Just a Numbers Game

We published a revision to our Precision Medicine Scorecard: Drug Company Edition last month. As John Audette rightfully notes, there are multiple factors in a pharmaceutical company’s contribution to precision medicines:

• How many precision medicines a company currently markets;
• The percentages of the company’s recent clinical trials that involve biomarkers;
• The number of novel oncology drugs the company has in its pipeline;
• The number of “proprietary” biomarkers the company is using in its clinical trials.

While we continue to highlight why biomarkers are critical to precision medicine we wanted to test the raw usage of biomarkers by the top 10 pharma against each other to further support John’s conclusions in the Scorecard.

We decided to leverage our new Workspace feature in BiomarkerBase to compare our ranking to general use of biomarkers by each of the top 10 pharma companies as compared against each other.  Our process was to simply compare each of the top 10 pharma against each other in biomarker usage in oncology.  We chose oncology because each top pharma company is well represented.

The top 5 pharmaceutical companies, by our Precision Medicine Scorecard, are using more biomarkers than anyone else.  However, second place Roche is more closely associated with seventh place Merck.  Third place AstraZeneca is below seventh place Merck.

More research is need to determine what practices are contributing to pharmaceutical company’s commercial success in precision medicine.  What do the biomarker practices look like at, for instance, Novartis?