The New Service Model for Diagnostics

One constant refrain from the late September rEvolution 2005 Symposium for Chief Scientific Officers on Kiawah Island—other than the knotty issue of research productivity—was the increasing importance of diagnostics. The basic challenge: given the attrition rates of drug candidates in company pipelines, the safety requirements from FDA, and the costs of therapy—all rising--the importance of markers that can either determine which drugs to develop or which therapies to use has become patently obvious.

At least four of the attending companies—Roche , Affymetrix Inc. , Perlegen Sciences Inc. and XDx Inc. —have important diagnostic or biomarker programs that are central...