Exploring R&D Alliances

Part I of Biopharma R&D Partnerships 2nd Edition

This book is about “David & Goliath” R&D partnerships in pharmaceuticals—bilateral arrangements in which one partner is a smaller bioscience or academic organisation (David) and the other a large multinational corporation (Goliath). The past decade has seen a paradigm shift to a new distributed model of pharmaceutical R&D that seamlessly blends external partnerships with in-house efforts to generate innovative medicines and create new value. Smaller bioscience firms and academia have been both beneficiaries and targets of this fundamental change. Partnering with giant pharmaceutical corporations can provide the resources and channels to market that an academic laboratory or smaller company simply does not have, but this approach also brings unexpected challenges and new demands.

In this second edition, the original Biopharma R&D Partnerships book has been re-written and expanded into a four-part e-book series—the first part provides a foundation and a common platform for the whole series; the remaining three Parts can then be read in any order. Part I (“Exploring R&D Alliances”, this e-book) introduces the key concepts of biopharma partnering and provides a framework for understanding and analysing these partnerships, with specific reference to bilateral R&D alliances.

In this Part I, Chapter 1 chronicles the industrywide decline in R&D productivity that led to the emergence of the new biopharma R&D paradigm we see today. Chapter 2 introduces various salient features of biopharma R&D partnerships including commonly-used terminology, partnership agreements, the alliance life cycle, governance, partnership benefits, partnership liabilities and financial mechanisms. Chapter 3 delves into the very important topic of risk and its characteristics. Chapter 4 provides a framework and terminology for describing the structural dimensions of a partnership agreement. Chapter 5 introduces the concept of partnership interaction style by describing a number of possible models. Taken together, Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 constitute a toolkit that can be used to understand an existing bilateral biopharma R&D alliance or to jump-start the design process for a new one.

In the remaining e-books of this series, Part II (“Initiating R&D Alliances”) focuses on how new bilateral R&D partnerships are established. Part III (“Managing R&D Alliances”) then concentrates on the execution of bilateral R&D partnerships. Last but not least, Part IV (“R&D Alliance Trends”) highlights some important trends with respect to collaboration in the biopharma R&D ecosystem.

About the Author

Robert Thong consults, speaks and writes on business strategy, collaborations and change in the biosciences. Over the past twenty five years, he has worked with more than one hundred different pharmaceutical, biotech, medical equipment and healthcare organisations.