Last month, Avalon's founder Kevin Kinsella did an interview with Xconomy where he stated that Big Pharma was engaging in more predatory tactics when approaching deal making with biotechs. And, he claimed the behavior was getting increasingly worse over the last 5 years.
What Biotech Wants From Big Pharma Partners: Survey Says!?.
The In Vivo blog (above link) published a summary from a Boston Consulting Group survey that looked at biotech's desired behaviors from a big pharma partner in a deal. It also named those Big Pharma players who were most admired by biotech in this regard. The survey was performed with 100 respondents (out of 500) who were heads of business development or CEOs at biotechs.
Roche and Merck emerged as the survey winners. Roche won top honors in four categories:
- Deal structure flexibility
- Executive leadership
- Alliance management
- Manufacturing expertise
Merck led in five categories itself, including:
- Responsiveness
- BD/licensing group access
- Therapeutic areas of interest
- Control over development
- Post-deal success
Companies receiving honorable mentions in the survey included, GSK, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and the biotech Celgene.
BCG did not divulge the losers in the survey. They did note that Japanese companies images had improved drastically since the surveys conducted in 2003, 2006 and 2008. It would be interesting to see if any of the winners were also companies that Kinsella was referring to in his comments above. If not, it would be interesting to know who he was talking about and how these companies fared in the BCG survey too. There do seem to be some prominent names missing from the winners and honorable mention list.
Posted by Bruce Lehr March 26th 2011.
More on this from the Pharmalot blog this morning (March 31st)
http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/03/lets-make-a-deal-biotechs-like-which-drugmakers/
Posted by: bigredbruce | 03/31/2011 at 11:09 AM