As patent expirations and pipeline failures abound Big Pharma is finding new blockbusters increasingly hard to come by. Susan Birks reports from the BioBusiness meeting in London on industry’s move away from traditional r&d models to partnering and open innovation.
Whether you believe that the era of the blockbuster is dead, or that mass sellers are still in the pipeline, it is clear that the traditional pharmaceutical landscape is changing. Medical discoveries made in the past decades in the fields of proteomics and genomics have pushed the boundaries of traditional medicine and a host of new biological therapies are possible. The emergence of biosimilars, the unravelling of the human genome and successful therapies using stem cells suggest that the medicines of tomorrow will be more effective and better targeted and not in the form of a blockbuster pill.
As a consequence, Big Pharma is busy adapting strategies to ensure it gains a foothold in these new therapeutic fields. On the other side of the fence, small biotech start-ups and academic spin-offs are on the increase – but face the perennial problem of lack of finance and facilities. So how can the two successfully co-exist and do better business? More creative partnering and Open Innovation were the main themes set out at the BioBusiness conference held in London in February.
For Big Pharma the need to reinvent is urgent. Apart from reaching a ‘patent cliff’, it faces the further issue that new drugs are subjected to increased scrutiny and rising threshold of innovation from regulatory agencies and healthcare payers. Where previously blockbusters merely required a level of improvement in efficacy, safety or convenience compared with standard treatments, now they must perform better in patient outcomes.
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