Where Would You Start a Company?

We’ve been talking a lot around here about small companies versus large ones, the merits of different therapeutic areas, and so on. So here’s a question: if you were starting a small drug company today, where would you concentrate its efforts?

Oncology? Ten years ago, you could make that case, I think. But now everyone’s piled into the area, so you’d have to have a real edge to make a go of it. For one thing, finding patients for clinical trials is a major problem. Your best shot here would be really obscure varieties of cancer, I’d think, unless you’ve got something really major. And how do you ever know if you’ve got something really major or not in this area until you get to the clinic, anyway?

Anti-infectives? There’s certainly room for some new niche products here, but that’s what they’re going to be. And this is a surprisingly difficult area to make headway in, if you haven’t worked in it before. Nothing’s going to be an almighty blockbuster here (because nothing new is going to be a frontline therapy), but there is money to be made.

Cardiovascular and metabolics? I don’t see how, and I barely see why, unless you’ve got the miracle HDL-raising pill up your sleeve. Diabetes, for its part, has been a fine area over the last ten or twenty years, but the safety criteria for a new therapy are now very stiff (and the market is pretty well covered, from several different angles). Not recommended, I’d say.

Alzheimer’s? Good luck! Man, is there ever an unserved market here, but it’s unserved for a lot of damned good reasons. The same goes for a number of other CNS indications. This whole area is a tightrope of risk and reward. Both are huge.

Or would you go the Genzyme route, making huge amounts by helping out people (a few people) that no one else can help at all? Again, this presupposes that you have some really good idea about how to approach these orphan diseases, and it’s going to be tough to make a whole company out of them (since they’re spread over such disparate therapeutic specialties). But this would seem to be feasible, with some luck.

Suggestions are welcome in the comments. I’m definitely not planning on starting a company myself, but I think that we need as many as possible, and perhaps some ideas will trigger something for someone in a position to act. . .