Perhaps counter-intuitively, rare diseases can present attractive business opportunities for pharmaceutical companies. As discussed previously on Vector, they generally offer:
1) a population of patients with a high, unmet need, greatly lowering the bar to FDA approval
2) a closely networked disease community, greatly lowering the bar to creating disease registries and mounting clinical trials
3) well-studied disease pathways.
Recoiling from expensive failures of would-be blockbuster drugs, companies like Pfizer, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Shire and Roche are embracing rare diseases, despite their small market sizes, because of their much clearer path to clinic. But in the current risk-averse industry environment, some projects are stalling. Industry may need more incentive to jump in—and Cydan Development is basing its business model on providing it. …