One of the biggest developments in mining today is the re-evaluation and activation of existing gold mines. The reason is obvious. The price of gold has exploded over the past decade, making previously marginal gold mining properties suddenly hot, with huge money making potential, especially when new technologies can be applied. Less well known is the fact that almost exactly the same thing is now happening in the pharmaceutical industry.
What has exploded in pharmaceuticals is the cost of development. Bringing a new drug candidate to market can easily take a billion dollars, sometimes much more, plus well over a decade in time. Making matters worse, after spending vast amounts of money to discover, develop, and validate the efficacy of a new drug, a pharmaceutical company can end up having to shelve it due to unexpected heart or liver toxicity issues. It’s been estimated that fully a third of all potential new drugs fail in preclinical or clinical trials because of safety concerns. It’s a serious problem. Over the past decade, the number of new drugs approved by the FDA has decreased by over 50%, representing billions of dollars in lost opportunity for the industry. If there were a more cost effective and accurate way of assessing possible toxicity problems early on in a drug’s development, allowing researchers to make adjustments before all the money has been spent, many drug candidates could be saved.
It’s a tremendous prospect now being made reality by a California company called VistaGen Therapeutics. VistaGen has come up with a novel way to use advanced stem cell technology for superior predictive toxicology bioassay systems that more closely approximate human biology. It’s a new technology that promises enormous savings in the drug development process and could unlock revenues in the billions of dollars through the re-examination of previously shelved drug candidates for possible non-toxic variants. Like gold mines brought back to life, such drug candidates could mean untold rewards if toxicity issues can be economically resolved, something now being made possible thanks to VistaGen.
To get an idea of what it all could mean for a successful pharmaceutical company, and for VistaGen, consider the top 10 selling drugs in the U.S. The average annual sales for a drug on this list is just under $5 billion.
For additional information, visit the company’s website at www.VistaGen.com
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