Ferrokin Biosciences, a Californian pharmaceutical company is more one example of the power of Social Media and technology to make our lives easier and better. It's a small company with only seven employees who work from home, and a collection of about 60 vendors and contractors who supply all the disparate pieces of the drug-development process. And its headquarters is in at the attic of the farmhouse-style home of Dr. Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr.
Rienhoff founded the company in 2007 as a start-up, a virtual biotech company. Since then, his team has picked up talent and resources as needed, raising $27 million and seeing a drug from development into Phase 2 clinical trials. However, how can they accomplish all this without a lab?
Because Ferrokin has replaced the big lab building with a global community of vendors and freelancers linked by e-mails, social networks, and file sharing the company has a low-cost structure. This is a small company only connected by the tendrils of the Internet and the relationships that grow so easily there. The consequences are more variety of drugs in the market, and more niche drugs targeting neglected or rare diseases.
It is a smart way of using the complexity of the global community to fight the terrible complexity of diseases.
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Have you ever heard of a way Social Media and technology have helped science and medicine?
Rienhoff founded the company in 2007 as a start-up, a virtual biotech company. Since then, his team has picked up talent and resources as needed, raising $27 million and seeing a drug from development into Phase 2 clinical trials. However, how can they accomplish all this without a lab?
Because Ferrokin has replaced the big lab building with a global community of vendors and freelancers linked by e-mails, social networks, and file sharing the company has a low-cost structure. This is a small company only connected by the tendrils of the Internet and the relationships that grow so easily there. The consequences are more variety of drugs in the market, and more niche drugs targeting neglected or rare diseases.
It is a smart way of using the complexity of the global community to fight the terrible complexity of diseases.
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Have you ever heard of a way Social Media and technology have helped science and medicine?
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