Strategy for market entry in Regenerative Medicine

Hope is rising for “Regenerative Medicine”
Hope is rising for “Regenerative Medicine” which can restore structure and function of otherwise incurable illness. Regenerative medicine is expected to first progress in the areas of metabolic diseases such as diabetes, hepatic cirrhosis and eye disease. The number of patients in these areas is estimated to be 13 million in the USA and 5 million in Japan. In 2014 regenerative medicine was reregulated in Japan, which enabled much shorter time-to-market. It is believed that regenerative medicine will further going forward in Japan.

Emergence of companies that does cell culturing on consignment basis and potential market
“Cell-culture”, an essential process in manufacturing the regenerative therapeutic drugs, requires a large capital investment and advanced technology. Also, because culturing was mostly done by human manual labor, there always was a human error risk and always is a need to develop capable engineers. Given this situation, for regenerative medicine to be in mass production process, there was a potential demand for special institutes that does cell culturing on consignment basis. This meant that potentially cell culturing on consignment could be an industry infrastructure in the future. “Automatic Culture Apparatus” which minimizes the risk of human error and drops the manufacturing cost seemed particularly effective to gain competitive advantages. Also, once it is set up changing the manufacturing process would be difficult in this field. Therefore, we felt it is important to gain first-mover-advantage.

Proposed a strategy for entering “cell culture” on consignment
To help them enter this cell culturing on consignment business at early stage, we relied on our expertise gained from our subsidiary, NC Medical Research, in cell therapy drugs for cerebral infarction, and our new businesses development know-how. We did a target setting for “cerebral infarction”, the biggest market, and analyzed the success factors for automatic culture apparatus which meets the criteria of safe, cheap and mass culture. We provided support for a Japanese company that has expertise and technologies from their successful semiconductor business. We assisted them in their market entry in “Cell-Culture Consignment Business” and “Automatic Culturing Apparatus.”