According to the article:
"At a weighted cost approaching $1.8 billion to bring a new molecular entity to market, few pharmaceutical companies have the pipelines required to replace revenues threatened by loss of patent protection. As a consequence, there are many within the industry that believe something has to significantly change about the way pharma companies innovate and develop drugs."
Increasingly Companies are expanding beyond the traditional means of finding Partners.
More and more, deals are being initiated using online relationships and networks. The article goes on:
"How do people in these organizations find each other in the new vast virtual pharma world? The old wisdom dictated that business development people worth their salt know who to call, they don't need a database. But this is no longer the case; nowadays, they can take advantage of the growing proliferation of partnering conferences, databases and consultants playing matchmaker.
Matchmaker databases include PharmaLicensing, which recruits innovators to list their assets for partnering and recruits buyers of innovation to find these assets. Thomson Reuters has recently taken this concept a step further in its Outpartnering Registry, which lets innovators list for free their drug partnering interest directly in its pipeline database, which many top pharma business development groups use to find drug licensing opportunities.
Big Pharma companies have traditionally relied on such databases to summarize and index the current state of the drug development pipeline, but, increasingly, smaller companies, venture capitalists and CROs are using such databases to find partnering opportunities."
While no deal, especially deals as complex as those in Pharma, will be done totally online, it appears that the concept of 'online networking' is continuing to extend beyond sites like Facebook and into Pharma. It truly is becoming a virtual world.
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