Xconomy: Biogen and Fellow Boston-Area Biotechs Ready for Biogenerics
Summary
And a barrier to entering the business of making biogenerics is the huge investment required to build biotech drug plants, which must also be approved by regulators before the facilities can market products manufactured there.There are also businesses, such as Merck & Co.’s GlycoFi, of Lebanon, NH, where innovative technology has overcome some of the technical challenges of making copies of biotech drugs.Biogenerics have been near the top of the biotech industry’s policy agenda for years, but the issue has heated up recently as U.S. lawmakers look to overhaul the healthcare system.This means that biogeneric drugs aren’t exact copies of the originals, creating all manner of questions about whether the knockoffs should be required to undergo additional clinical trials to prove their safety and effectiveness.(Henri Termeer, the chairman and CEO of Cambridge, MA-based biotech powerhouse Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ), poked fun at the bio-betters moniker during a recent interview, an audio recording of which is embedded in this post from last week.)