Theragnostic Case Study

The THERAGNOSTIC project was initiated by DiagnosticLabs, a small company developing diagnostic assays for a number of diseases, to combine a new therapeutic with one of their diagnostics. DiagnosticLabs lacked the expertise for developing a therapeutic and handling the clinical trials in the THERAGNOSTIC project themselves. Therefore they reached out to TherapeuticCo to develop a therapeutic and to Bioclinical to conduct ‘due diligence’ on the therapeutic. Whilst the projects from DiagnosticLabs and TherapeuticCo were worked on simultaneously, Bioclinical’s project is initiated later as they need the generated knowledge from the TherapeuticCo project as the input for their own project. Bioclinical would then put the developed therapeutic through clinical trials to get the project FDA approval. Since the THERAGNOSTIC project involved multiple projects ran at multiple locations the ecology of the project is complex. The organisations were spatially distributed and the knowledge and labour was divided to the different project teams to each complete specialist work.

The SKIN project was initiated by Cell, a medium-sized biotechnology company. The team at Cell had primarily research skills and lacked commercial expertise to market the product properly. Therefore GlobalPharma was approached to license out the global sales and marketing rights. The GlobalPharma team started their project while the Cell team would still continue their development project work and conduct the projects early clinical trials, as well as scaling up manufacturing capacity. Although less organisations are involved in SKIN than in THERAGNOSTIC, the project ecology of SKIN can also be considered complex. The two companies were spatially distributed but the projects were worked on at the same time.

The main expertise of Cell is doing cutting-edge research and they focussed on developing SKIN. The project was accepted by GlobalPharma with the assumption that they  could rely on their existing IP for selling the product. Without actually knowing much about the product, the team at GlobalPharma started to market SKIN while there was still development work done by Cell. The project interactivity however was very low and the interdependency between the two organizations could be defined as pooled. GlobalPharma wasn’t really using any specific knowledge about SKIN to market it.

The THERAGNOSTIC project was an ongoing innovation process but the project interactivity was low just as with the SKIN project. The therapeutic and the diagnostic had to accompany each other to work. That’s why the projects at DiagnosticLabs and TherapeuticCo had a reciprocal nature in order to calibrate their diagnostic and therapeutic. However, TherapeuticCo used existing IP from a development project that had happened earlier which meant the interactivity between the companies was low. Bioclinical could only initiate their project with the knowledge that the other two projects had generated. The nature of the Bioclinical project interdependency is sequential to the other projects.