The market for healthcare, medicine and medical engineering is one of the top-selling branches of industry with a worldwide volume of far over 500 billions dollar. Furthermore it is judged by experts as one of the growth markets of the future.
MetrioPharm AG's pharmaceutical Product pipeline focuses on the growing segment anti-infectiva and immunomodulators.
The increasing life expectancy, the appearance of new infectious diseases like hepatitis C and HIV as well as the danger of epidemics like SARS or bird flu bring new challenges for the development of effective therapies.
Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C is cited as an example for new infections. This viral infection of the liver leads as chronic illness to destruction of the liver tissue (hepatic cirrhosis) and is accompanied by a increased risk of cancer of the liver. 170 million people worldwide are infected with hepatitis C, alone 5 million infected people in Europe. The only available therapy up to now is the interferon. Currently only approx. 100,000 patients can be treated, the price of the therapy is approx. $ 20,000 for each patient. Studies predict the market for hepatitis C therapies to double between 2004 and 2009 to almost 4 bn $. For a new, more reasonable medicine the market potential is immense.
Tuberculosis of the lung
Infectious diseases believed to be defeated for long today again confront the medicine with increasing problems. Many pathogenes grew resistant to the common antibiotics. A new, effective medicine is urgently required here. An example is the tuberculosis of the lung. After years of the fall the tuberculosis in Western Europe is on the advance again, too. Every 15 seconds a man dies of tuberculosis. More and more tuberculosis pathogenes get resistant against the now-available standard therapy. Therefore worldwide new therapies are urgently needed. The illness causes expenses of 12 bn Dollars per annum, as the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development estimates.
Rheumatoide arthritis (RA)
Approx. 6 million people in Europe and the USA suffer of this chronic synovitis. Till now, RA is treated mainly with painkillers which don't stop the course of a disease themselves and often cause side effects like stomach bleeding. The first specific therapy of the RA, established a few years ago were TNF alpha blockers. This therapy with bio molecules is effective but extremely expensive. Moreover, this medicine can only be applied as a syringe and not as a tablet. Despite these restrictions each of the three available TNF alpha blockers reached an annual turnover (2006) between 1.1 and 2.8 bn dollars 3-5 years after market launch.
These general conditions and the growing anticipations to healthcare and quality of life secure decades of growing rates for enterprises which develop innovative, effective therapies.