Chicago, Illinois — The work of one company in Northbrook, Illinois, is underscoring the stakes of the fast-paced, dynamic world of bringing important treatments to market. While technology and innovation have reaped benefits in the treatments of many cancers and diseases thought for decades to be incurable, no pharmacologic treatment exists for more than 6,000 recognized rare diseases because many pharmaceutical companies have not been able to invest the extraordinary sums required to develop products for diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 patients.
The Long Race
Marathon Pharmaceuticals – and its 100 employees working just outside Chicago – are filling a void in the marketplace. They call themselves “Marathon” because it really is a long race to find effective treatments, and they know it is a difficult climb to do what has not been done before. But like running a marathon, you don’t do it because it’s easy, you do it because it’s hard, and when you run through the tape in this work, you’re actually saving lives.
Innovation in today’s pharmaceutical marketplace is remarkable, but research dollars still flow more readily to those treatments that serve the biggest populations of those in need. Left behind are small groups of patients in desperate need of hope.
Marathon Pharmaceuticals History
Marathon Pharmaceuticals was founded to bring to market important treatments for diseases that the “big companies” weren’t dedicating the time or research dollars required. Marathon was founded to do good for the world. The entire Marathon team feels a personal motivation to create and grow Marathon into a viable developer of treatments that can make a difference, with the right investment and sweat equity to make them commercially viable.
Backed by a board of respected experts and advisors from science, business and policy circles, Marathon is putting its money where its mouth is by investing in research, trials, and compliance with a maze of federal rules and regulations. Marathon is committing itself to groundbreaking work on chronic, lifelong, and usually life-threatening diseases and conditions from adrenal cancer to Huntington’s Disease.
Numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Marathon’s leaders will tell you that the human factor is why they’re so invested and that nothing is more motivating than a conversation with a patient who is counting on the company to make a difference.
People Come First
Marathon’s patient-centric approach simply isn’t possible at a big publicly-traded pharmaceutical company that is accountable to its shareholders. To meet its objectives, Marathon needs to do something new in the marketplace, which requires patience – exactly what is needed to run a marathon. Marathon is reinvesting its corporate profits to drive innovation and build its pipeline of rare disease treatments. As a privately-held company, its corporate structure and financial independence creates the flexibility and ability to efficiently bring medicines to market for overlooked or underserved patients.
From its inception, Marathon Pharmaceuticals has been a disruptor in an industry in need of new thinking and new models, achieving promising results. Marathon has created a new model which today is being reinvented by other market disruptors, including Prometric Life Sciences, Corbus Pharmaceuticals, and GigaGen. While “disruptor” wasn’t part of Marathon’s lexicon when it started, they find themselves today doing something that has never been done before in the industry. Many industry experts agree that Marathon is reflecting the wave of the future, as start-up companies are now being conceived with a compelling rationale on how to treat a specific patient population and are able to attract investment dollars that years ago would have gone to companies focused on large chronic diseases.
Today, more patients suffering from rare diseases are hoping that companies like Marathon are placing the right bet in a fast-moving, dynamic marketplace.
More about Marathon Pharmaceuticals on https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/marathon-pharmaceuticals
