Looking for a Good Deal
Executive Summary
A survey of more than 150 pharmaceutical company senior business development and licensing executives comment on which types of deal-making would play the greatest role in deal-making industry-wide over the next two years.
A lot of people think deal-making is getting more innovative—but not at their companies.
A survey of more than 150 pharmaceutical company senior business development and licensing executives at this year's Pharmaceutical Strategic Alliances Conference, held in New York, September 16-17, asked which of four types of deal-making—horizontal consolidation, disease management/market channel, genomics/drug discovery, or traditional in-licensing and co-promotion—would play the greatest role in deal-making industry-wide over the next two years. The winners, consolidation and drug discovery, which together earned votes from 70% of the respondents.
But asked which of the four deal types their own companies were most likely to engage in, traditional deals scored highest, by a relatively wide margin over drug discovery, which dropped from 37% to 28%.
Consistent with this view, the business development executives indicated they were hungrier than ever for late-stage product deals. Fully 86% said they're more interested in late-stage deals now than they were two years ago. At the same time, 55% said they felt they were seeing fewer late-stage opportunities than they have in the past. Nearly 60% said they were also looking outside the pharmaceutical/biotech industry—to diagnostics, devices, or information technology—for alliance opportunities.