Berg Pharma, a small Boston-based biotech firm founded by billionaire Carl Berg, is collaborating with a prestigious lineup of hospitals and research teams to come up with the first ever biomarker for pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of cancer, Fortune reported, citing knowledgeable sources.
On Tuesday, this alliance, which includes Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, and the Pancreatic Cancer Research Team, will officially announce its project.
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According to Fortune, the new partnership will fill a huge gap in the research done by Big Pharma corporations, which prefer to concentrate on rare diseases, where the profit is very high, or on chronic diseases, where there are ongoing returns.
To be blunt, finding a cure for pancreatic cancer would be difficult to come up with and the expense too high to justify the effort to shareholders. So someone other than the for-profits must do it.
Silicon Valley real estate billionaire Carl Berg told Xconomy his biotech startup Berg Pharma is set up to “revolutionize” healthcare.
Berg Pharma president and chief technology officer Niven Narain told the same publication that Berg can cut the time and expense of drug development “in half.”
This is no flimsy biotech startup, apparently. Berg’s Framingham, MA outfit has almost 200 employees working in three divisions, which include an in-house diagnostics unit. They have a drug discovery platform, and programs in cancer, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease.
“We see ourselves as fertilizing the Big Pharma community with great, validated clinical assets that can be marketed that are much more safe and effective, ” Narain said.
