Entering regenerative medicine: the allogeneic stem-cell agent ADR-001 (2013)

From drugs to cells: a drug maker crosses over

The heart of this move can be read as a company that earns its money from eye drops and lotions deliberately spending resources on cell therapy — a field whose time horizon and uncertainty are nothing like those of the products on its shelves. Regenerative medicine demands long years and enormous sums to reach approval, with a high chance of foundering along the way; for anyone sharply answerable for quarterly profit, it was a hard area to choose. There is no denying that it was precisely because the founding family led the management and Rohto could keep its distance from the short-term pressure of outside capital that it could go on staking research resources, in decade-long units, on a field whose payoff it could not read in advance.

If Hada Labo in 2001 was a crossing that widened a pharmaceutical formulation into cosmetics, the 2013 entry into regenerative medicine was a further crossing still — into the realm of cells, outside medicine itself. From eye drops to cosmetics, from cosmetics to food and farming, and on to cells, Rohto has redrawn the outline of its founding trade little by little. That said, the practical use of ADR-001 is still in the middle of clinical work, and whether this long-term investment will bear fruit as a pillar of earnings cannot be foreseen as of this writing. How much fruit the attempt to graft advanced medicine onto a base built with mass-market drugs will return over the next decade remains an open question.