Startups vs. Big Pharma

Bruce Booth has opened up the number of authors who will be posting at LiveSciVC, and there's an interesting post up on startups now from Atlas Ventures' Mike Gilman. Edit: nope, my mistake. This is Bruce Booth's! Here are some of his conclusions: here’s a list of a few of the perceived advantages of Pharma R&D today: Almost unlimited access to all the latest technologies across drug discovery, ADME, toxicology, and clinical development, including all the latest capital equipment, compound libraries, antibody approaches, etc International reach to support global clinical and regulatory processes to fully enable drug development programs Deep and insightful commercial input into the markets, the pulse of the practicing physician, and the payors on what’s the right product profile Gigantic cash flow streams that provide 15-20% of the topline to support a largely “block grant” model of R&D (fixing R&D spend to the percentage of sales) Decades of institutional memory providing the scar tissue around what works and what doesn’t (e.g., insight into project attrition at massive scale) This is a solid list of advantages, and they all have real merit. But like the biblical Goliath, whose size and strength appeared to the Israelites as great advantages, they are also the roots of Pharma’s disadvantages. All of these derive their value as inward and relatively insular forces. Institutional memory in particular can serve to either unlock better paths to innovation or to ...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs