Talk to any Big Pharma business development executive about deal-making trends for more than 15 minutes and the word out-licensing is bound to crop up. It’s not hard to understand why: drugmakers face significant cost-constraints thanks to patent expirations and shrinking R&D budgets, and mid-stage pipelines are overly full in the wake of recent mega-mergers. As a result, says Doug Giordano, a VP of business development at Pfizer Inc., executives realize “it is now more attractive to outlicense assets than allow [them] to sit on the shelves.”
And certainly many different groups are bound to be interested in Big Pharma’s de-prioritized mid-stage assets. VCs in particular are...