Several good blogs have been covering the recent downsizing of R&D departments in the major pharma companies. See In the Pipeline and Pharma Conduct posts.
At the same time that we're seeing downsizing of in-house R&D, AstraZeneca announced its intention to follow an outsourcing model. Sanofi-Aventis yesterday announced a new research partnership agreement with Aviesan as reported in Pharmaceutical Business Review. The goal is to increase knowledge in life science and healthcare in disease areas like ageing, immuno-inflammatory diseases, infectious disease and regenerative medicine. Aviesan is comprised of the CEA, CNRS, INRA, INRIA, Inserm, Institut Pasteur, IRD, conference of university presidents and conference of regional and university hospital CEOs.
Similarly, Genentech announced today a $13 M research agreement with the Univeristy of California at San Francisco as reported in Fierce Biotech. This agreement will address new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. A Univeristy spokesman said this agreement is transformative from the university's perspective as it is a true collaboration to generate drug candidates.
Clearly, we have an industry in transition. New models to replace existing R&D models are being explored and will continue to be explored until a greater rate of product success is achieved or we all implode.
Posted by Bruce Lehr Feb 20, 2010
Fai - good post. You may be interested in checking out a discussion being held on LinkedIn in the group Lifesciences Opportunities in US. The post was created by Mark McBride on Jan 29th and has to do with R&D pipelines, http://bit.ly/a1jGD0.
Not everything in discussion thread is germane to comments you made above, but you might want to read comments by Thomas Wilckens. He supports concept of open innovation too and runs group called Symbiotic Innovation. His website www.innventis.com.
Posted by: Bruce Lehr | 02/21/2010 at 11:04 PM
The traditional paradigm of innovation that the R&D department are required to control and generate their own ideas are really not efficient and benifital to the organization. Open innovation in which firms use external and internal ideas to advance their technology are the new trend in R&D. The idea is to use the outside knowledge and expertise (see nine sigma website) to benefit the organization. An organization cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research. Instead they should look into using interllectual property from other companies. More improtantly, organization should take out the internal inventions that doesn’t fit the organization’s stratgic plan for profit (maybe through licensing, joint ventures, spin-offs etc.).
The book OPEN Innovation by Henry Chesbrough give more insight on how R&D in organizations can use this model to better their innovation.
http://www.amazon.com/Open-Innovation-Imperative-Profiting-Technology/dp/1578518377
Big Pharma are transiting into “Banks” that finance small biotech/pharma for their ideas, but they did very little about selling their ideas or knowledge’s (something will be very beneficial for their suppliers). R&D scientists can no longer be just LABRATs that solely pumping out ideas. They need to develop a set of skills that enable them to understand market demand; technology trend; and technology true value, a skill of value innovation, not technological innovation. Sooner or later, the wall between business development and R&D will collapse and the two will merge.
Posted by: Fai | 02/21/2010 at 10:35 PM