Biotechnology Firms
Exploring New Frontiers of Medical ScienceChallenges in Early Stage Research
Biotech companies operate at the bleeding edge of drug discovery. They are the brave explorers of new medical frontiers. Biotechs identify potential new cures, conduct vast amounts of preclinical research, and shepherd the most promising therapies through early stage clinical trials.
Conducting early stage research means navigating in an environment of high uncertainty. Early clinical trials are expensive and involve small patient populations which yield much smaller data sets than later trials. Extracting confident knowledge from small data sets is a critical function of successful biotech firms.
Financing early clinical trials is extremely challenging, and has become increasingly more so with shifting preferences of venture capital investors. For the innovative biotechnology company, proving and demonstrating success early is vital to both the success of the drug and the survival of the company.
How We Help
Some of the ways Origent helps biotech 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.
- Informing new experiments. For each patient in a clinical trial, we compare observed disease progression to predicted disease progression. By estimating the response of each patient in comparison to their expected untreated condition, we can isolate likely responders. By analyzing the likely responders, possible responder subgroups are identified, which can then be confirmed through additional experiments.
- Demonstrating treatment evidence to current and potential investors. Virtual control arm analyses can be used to estimate the overall treatment effect of a drug sooner, demonstrating quantifiable value to shareholders and potential investors. Our methods provide objective analysis and hard numbers often demanded by discriminating investors.
Applications for the Biotech Industry
Origent has developed several applications for reducing the risks of early-stage drug development using predictive models and individual patient-level dynamics. Examples of some applications of interest to biotech firms include:
Disease Areas
Origent has active development in many disease areas, including: