R&D from the Comfort of an Attic

Despite having seven employees who all work from home, FerroKin Biosciences plans to bring a drug to market in 2015, reports The Atlantic's Quinn Norton. This low overhead model, Norton adds, allows the companies to focus on nice drugs, and the one FerroKin is developing is to treat congenital anemias. "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," Norton writes. At the Decision Tree, Brian Mossop agrees that "the future of biotech discovery and development will be crafted in these specialized, small, startup companies." Mossop, though, says that that future is already here.