Jennifer A. Filbey, Ph.D.

The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are at a critical point in their evolution. Industry experts at Datamonitor, an independent market analyst firm, say that in 2002 about $30 billion worth of blockbuster drugs lost patent protection. By 2008, an additional $35.5 billion worth of products is expected come off patent. At the same time, a host of scientific innovations in drug discovery including the use of high-throughput screening techniques, new classes of therapeutics such as aptamer technology and RNAi, and genomics-driven discovery methods, have resulted in large numbers of new drug candidates.