Size Doesn't Matter. Does Anything?

There's a new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that tries to find out what factors about a company influence its research productivity. This is a worthy goal, but one that's absolutely mined with problems in gathering and interpreting the data. The biggest one is the high failure rate that afflicts everyone in the clinic: you could have a company that generates a lot of solid ideas, turns out good molecules, gets them into humans with alacrity, and still ends up looking like a failure because of mechanistic problems or unexpected toxicity. You can shorten those odds, for sure (or lengthen them!), but you can never really get away from that problem, or not yet. The authors have a good data set to work from, though: It is commonly thought that small companies have higher research and development (R&D) productivity compared with larger companies because they are less bureaucratic and more entrepreneurial. Indeed, some analysts have even proposed that large companies exit research altogether. The problem with this argument is that it has little empirical foundation. Several high-quality analyses comparing the track record of smaller biotechnology companies with established pharmaceutical companies have concluded that company size is not an indicator of success in terms of R&D productivity1, 2. In the analysis presented here, we at The Boston Consulting Group examined 842 molecules over the past decade from 419 companies, and again found no correlation between company siz...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs