Business // Public healthU.S. shifts bio-defense R&D approach to "platform technologies"

The Obama administration recently opened up bio-defense funding in a way that should make the field more interesting to many companies. The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) is attempting to get more businesses involved in combating potential terrorist threats by broadening the types of technology it is paying to develop. This policy shift provides a significant opportunity for non-traditional players to win substantial government contracts.

Chandresh Harjivan writes in Forbes that the government is making it clear that it hopes to get a bigger bang for its bio-defense buck. The new plan features a strategy to fund so-called “platform technologies” that apply to many different infectious disease threats, whether they be bioterrorism (anthrax), pandemics (influenza), or infectious diseases affecting the developing world (malaria). This money could provide an extra incentive to justify corporate R&D investments in vaccine, drug, and diagnostic technologies. The government also is funding a new $200 million “strategic investment firm” in the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to help small biotech firms target terrorist threats.

Harjivan writes that the new funding focus is a paradigm shift in the government’s thinking about the enormous sums it has been spending to deal with the public health consequences of potential chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) terrorism agents that lack available medical counter-measures. The government has spent $5.6 billion during the last six years under one program, HHS’s Project BioShield. The FY2011 budget calls for $6.48 billion in bio-defense spending across many agencies.

In the past government contracts in bio-defense have been designed to meet medical threats posed by a particular terror agent. Large companies with the greatest expertise in drug or diagnostic development, however, often have not wanted to spend resources to test for say, smallpox, because the potential market is tiny (note that Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic A/S, a biotech company that expects less than $60 million in revenue this year, won the $505 million Project BioShield smallpox vaccine contract in 2007. Despite delays, it delivered the first doses of smallpox vaccine for people with compromised immune systems in July; see “Finding a smallpox vaccine for the event of a bioterror attack,” 6 July 2010 HSNW).

Harjivan writes that the U.S. government now wants to complement that sort of narrowly focused investment. According to analysis by Harjivan’s firm, PRTM, in the current fiscal year, $5.9 billion or 91 percent of the bio-defense total is budgeted for programs that have cross-cutting applications in fighting infectious diseases.