BioMarin Reflection
BioMarin was founded in 1997 by Christopher Starr Ph.D and Grant W Dennison Jr with a $1.5 million investment from Glyko Biomedical. It is the world lead in developing and commercializing innovative bio-pharmaceuticals for rare diseases. Of these diseases the patient population mostly consists of children. The core business and research is in enzyme replacement therapies (ERT’s). BioMarin was the first company to provide therapeutics the for mucopolysaccharidosis type 1 (MPS-1). The total patients for some rare diseases are as few as 1000 patients. It was the first to provide therapeutics for phenylketonuria (PKU) as well as other rare diseases. The company was founded in founded 1997 - with ten years of clinical research, that means only 9 years of research has been put into the market at most. The current net income of BioMarin is 134 million per year. Ranked 10th in Forbes list of innovative companies. Leader in Immortal Chinese Hamster ovary cell harvesting CHO cells. They currently have 5 drugs that are available on the market--each is an orphan drug. Orphan drugs are pharmaceutical agents that has been developed specifically to treat a rare medical condition, the condition itself being referred to as an orphan disease. The field trip we had there was interesting in the fact that we only had a little bit of time there. There was enough time to get 10-15 minutes at each station which there were only three stations to visit. The content we learned in there, they thought we already knew because of us being STEM students. I think that next time we go on a field trip we should learn more of the content aspect so we actually have a slight idea of what they talk about during the presentation/tour. Overall I would say we need more time to ask questions and get more content in our systems. It was a vert interesting field trip and one of the better ones this year.