Pharmaceuticals Companies

Leading Medical Science in a High-Risk Industry

Big pharmaceuticals companies span the spectrum from early stage research to acquirer/investor to manufacturing specialist.  These juggernauts are responsible for bringing the promising early-stage candidates through late stage clinical trials and market approval.  Big pharma is a vital force for delivering new treatments and therapies to patients around the world.

Many big pharmaceutical companies often engage in a large amount of early-stage research, but also manage late-stage research and trials begun by biotech companies.  Consequently, big pharma companies often become the primary investors in biotech firms for particular disease areas.  They invest hundreds of millions (and even billions) of dollars in late stage clinical trials based on the results of early stage research conducted by smaller biotechs.

Evaluating these biotech firms and their results to identify the most promising acquisition candidates is a daunting, high-risk challenge.  When a late stage trial does fail, the costs are truly staggering, often resulting in losses exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars.

How We Help

Some of the ways Origent helps pharmaceutical companies reduce their drug development costs and risks include:

• Helping conduct more effective small trials, by enrolling patients who are predicted to have similar disease progression profiles. This homogeneity of progression makes drug effects more obvious and allows trials to be conducted using fewer patients.
• Creating efficacy data through virtual control arms. When an early stage trial lacks a placebo arm, efficacy information is often speculative and always difficult to quantify.  Origent develops personalized progression paths to show how the symptoms of each patient in the trial likely would have progressed without the drug.  By comparing each patient to their personalized control, we can estimate the treatment effect of the drug without conducting a placebo-controlled study.
• Rescuing failed drugs. When a late stage trial fails, there is increased pressure on executives to find new value in the drug before the massive investments made become wasted assets.  For each patient in a failed clinical trial, we compare observed disease progression to predicted disease progression.  We compare these results to the earlier, successful trials to determine why the later trial failed.  By analyzing the likely responders, possible responder subgroups are identified, which can then be confirmed through additional experiments.  By simulating additional symptoms as additional endpoints, we analyze multiple endpoints from the same clinical trial population, to see if the drug can be repurposed to help target particular disease symptoms.
• Performing due diligence before acquisition of biotech firms. Virtual control arm analyses can be used to estimate the overall treatment effect of a drug when only sparse data is available.  This allows the pharmaceutical acquirer to compare multiple biotech companies against a common baseline, and improving company ROI by investing in only the most promising therapies.

Disease Areas

Origent has active development in many disease areas, including: