As the numbers of COVID-19 cases continue to increase, so do the numbers of companies that are working on COVID-19 tests, therapeutics, and vaccines. In early March we began tagging companies, in the Biotech-Careers.org database, that are working on COVID-19. Initially there was a small number of companies. By mid March there were 57, and today - April 6 - there are 109. It's great to know that there are so many companies working on this problem, but what else do they do?
We wanted to know too. The Biotech-Careers.org company (employer) database has always had a rich set of keywords (terms) that are used to tag companies better understand of biotechnology industry. We call these terms "core business activities," and each company in the database has one or more terms. Large technology companies, for example, that develop many different kinds of products will have several terms. Other companies may pursue different classes of therapeutic agents in multiple disease areas and have terms related to their technology and disease area(s). Similarly, as companies have begun working on COVID-19 they do so in their specific areas of expertise, and as we tag those companies with the COVID-19 core business activity, we can use each company's other tags to get a picture of what the COVID-19 companies do. Companies making antibodies for example, will likely work on immunoassays to detect virus, therapeutic antibodies, or vaccines. DNA sequencing companies will engage in developing molecular diagnostic tests, and so on.
It has always been possible to get a list of companies by a core activity key word and then see what else those companies do. But, it was a lot of work. You'd have to look at each company in the list, observe its other core activities, and then try to remember, or record, this information. While possible with a few companies, it's impossible when there are more then 10. To address this issue, we recently improved the way other core activities can be observed by adding a list of related terms to the top of the core activity pages. In this way, one can quickly see that companies that work on a particular core activity - like COVID-19 - also work on many other activities; 92 other areas in the case of COVID-19. For each other core activity, the number of companies with that term is also provided. Data are sorted by largest numbers to smallest (and by title within a number). Larger numbers are presented in larger fonts to visualize the data set as a word cloud to provide all the critical information upfront. For COVID-19, we see that 109 companies, in 364 locations work on COVID-19 and on 92 other areas.
Of the 109 current COVID-19 companies (figure below), 24 work on vaccines, 18 work on antibodies, and 31 work on diagnostics (diagnostics + molecular diagnostics) as the top "other" core activities. This shouldn't be too surprising and it's really good to see so much experience being quickly applied to this problem. To learn who the 24 COVID-19 / Vaccine companies are, simply click "Vaccines." The page will be reloaded and now filtered on companies that work on COVID-19 and Vaccines. You can see where the companies are and view who they are. You can return to the previous list via the web browsers back button or use the "Return to ... companies" link, or explore another set of companies by clicking the "View all companies that work with ... link." And, on any of the core activity pages you can use the radio buttons to filter all the data by World or United States to get additional perspective.
To get to the report shown below you can click this link, search for COVID-19 in the search box that appears on the font and many other pages, or browse all the business areas. Of course, the data will have changed by the time you read this.
Submitted by Todd Smith on Mon April 06, 2020.
