Big Pharma's new business model

The Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on 12/27 about Big Pharma's new business model.

In the article Scott Gottleib discusses an event last November that marked the end of an era for Big Pharma - Lipitor went off patent. Lipitor was the last of the big blockbusters for the industry.

While the industry has hit a bit of a rough patch - Gottleib says things are improving for the industry overall.

In his article, Gottleib details how Big Pharma is changing the way it discovers and develops new drugs. No longer are companies simply "screening millions of random compounds against a molecular target".

Instead Companies are embracing a model where, "Drugs are designed around the individual biological receptor they're targeting rather than being screened out of a library of random compounds"

Gottleib highlights other changes in the industry. He writes:

"...pharmaceutical companies started to carve up their sprawling research enterprises into smaller, more focused teams. The right size of a research team is now said to be 20-40 people. To get at new science early, drug makers rely on collaborations with academic research teams and licensing deals with smaller biotech outfits."

Again - while the industry still has challenges to face - it nevertheless appears better days lie ahead.