Medical Device Daily Correspondents

HELSINKI, Finland – Speaking earlier this week at the BioFinland 05 conference at the Helsinki Fair Center, Steven Burrill, CEO of Burrill & Co. (San Francisco), said the era of personalized medicine and theranostics is closer than many think.

Increasingly, the noted life sciences investment banker said, companies seeking approval for a new drug will need an accompanying predictive diagnostic test to convince regulators of its efficacy in defined patient populations.

“Don’t bet against it,” Burrill said in his conference keynote address, adding that payers “grab onto this technology and use it, because it will eliminate cost.” With access to greater predictability obtained through genomic information, he said healthcare systems will shift from caring for the needs of 5% of the population who are sick to maintaining the health of the majority population who are healthy.

“That’s both an extreme challenge and opportunity for us in this business,” Burrill said.

As the personalized era unfolds, the U.S. might not be the country best equipped to incorporate the underlying technologies, said David Cox, chief scientific officer at Perlegen Sciences (Mountain View, California), since it lacks the socialized healthcare system and the long-standing tradition of building national patient registers practiced in Finland and the other Nordic countries.

“I think [Nordic countries are] best adapted to demonstrate its utility in the shortest amount of time,” Cox told Medical Device Daily’s sister publication, BioWorld International.

Finland’s homogenous population and its state-run healthcare system, which has, over several decades, built up a rich store of epidemiological information, make it fertile ground for conducting population genetics studies. “Finland is one of the best-characterized populations in the world for disease mutations,” said Leena Peltonen-Palotie, professor of medical genetics at the University of Helsinki.

GeneOs Oy (Helsinki) is one company betting on that advantage. It disclosed “several million euros” in new investment this week to fund its construction of a biobank that will link lifestyle and clinical information on 6,000 patients with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to variations in associated genetic markers.

The company last year reported the discovery of two novel genes that are linked to asthma, one of which it characterized as an orphan G protein-coupled receptor. It has identified eight different variations, six of which appear to have varying degrees of disease risk.

On the funding side, Sitra (Helsinki), the Finnish national endowment, which has been one of the principal sources of seed financing for life science start-ups, is selecting 17 life sciences companies from its existing portfolio of 36 firms. It plans to create a new fund to support those, drawing on its own resources as well as finances it hopes to raise from international institutions.

A team from Sitra will be spun out to manage the new entity, with the whole process expected to be completed by year-end.

While that is good news for the companies selected for further support, Sitra’s withdrawal from life sciences seed funding will be a setback for a sector already suffering from an underdeveloped capital market, hampering the flow of start-up activity.

“The market is thin,” said Paavo Lipponen, former prime minister and speaker of parliament, who also was a speaker during the opening session of the BioFinland meeting. “There is an aversion to risk.”