Convergence: What's Next at the Nexus?

Feb 01 2005

• By Mary Stuart

Convergence is the great hope of pharmaceutical and device companies hoping to enter into new high growth markets with differentiated products. Drug-eluting stents turned a stagnant product into a thriving $6 billion market, and now companies are trying to find the next large opportunity that combines devices and drugs. They're looking at many kinds of implantable devices that incorporate biomaterials and drugs to achieve site specific drug delivery, in cardiovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease, ophthalmology, orthopedics, wound healing, and anti-infection.

For years, the promise of bringing together devices, with their structural and mechanical solutions to pathology, and drugs, the agents of biological responses, has dangled just out of reach of companies in the medical industries. At first, devices were to marry biologics in the field known as regenerative medicine. Devices would provide the scaffolding upon which drugs or biologics would help the body repair itself. Over the years, the failures of skin replacement companies and the lack of successes of companies working on artificial organs have made the term "regenerative medicine" synonymous with "pie in the sky" and rendered the segment pretty much unfinanceable.

Interest in device-pharma partnerships was renewed when biologics—proteins, genes, and cells--with their need for site-specific delivery, began to have commercial...