“The small industries and biotech freelancers springing up are, in some ways, like the divisions of the old behemoth drug company, but connected only by the tendrils of the Internet, and the relationships that grow so easily there. Rienhoff is contemporary biotech’s answer to the lost Renaissance man. He pulls the renaissance effect out of the network around him, using the terrible complexity of the global community to fight the terrible complexity of disease. It’s the way science ought to work.”
An interesting, if “anemic” article, on FerroKin, a virtual drug company developing chelating agents to treat excess iron due to blood transfusions (fixing the fix, I guess).
This is the second virtual drug developer I have hear about. In hi-tech, virtual programs managers are common, developing products across different companies – coder, hardware design, production, distribution. No reason to think that can’t be done in biotech. Especially with all the communication tools available.
