The CEO of atvis said: it's a hole for big pharmaceutical companies to develop their own! Why?

Source: new drug R & D.on January 22, 2015, Brent Saunders, CEO of Actavis, made a public speech on new drug R & D, which attracted wide attention of the industry Saunders said: it's a misconception that big pharmaceutical companies must do their own research Although he firmly believes in the value of innovation and new drug research must be done by someone, from the past experience, the investment in new drug research of large pharmaceutical companies has not been recovered, which is a loss business as a whole So he doesn't support it Does Saunders make sense? Of course, there are some reasons, but there are also some points that need to be clarified It is basically right that new drug R & D has become a loss business in the past 20 years The return on R & D has dropped from 15% to the latest 7-8%, about the cost of capital In the past 10 years, the pharmaceutical industry has cut about 300000 employees, of which R & D personnel account for a considerable proportion Large scale mergers and acquisitions continue, and there are few big companies left in the 1990s All these facts show that the return of R & D is declining But the surviving pharmaceutical companies are still very profitable, which means that even though the whole industry is a loss business, there are still many enterprises that are profitable This is also true of many other industries In the past five years, in addition to 2013, the number of new drugs approved by FDA has increased year by year, which shows that the running in of drug factories and drug supervision policies is getting better and better, and the project selection and development mode of drug factories are more and more in line with the requirements of drug supervision departments The soaring price of drugs shows that the projects chosen by pharmaceutical companies bring great value to patients On the other hand, biopharmaceutical shares have also performed well in recent years Last year, the total number of Biotech Corp IPO exceeded the peak of the biological bubble in 2000, raising a total of $about 6000000000 Many biotechnologies, such as cancer immunotherapy, gene therapy and RNA technology, are at the peak of disease treatment All this suggests that the return on new drug development is improving Saunders is against the research part, that is, the research or discovery phase This stage only accounts for 15% of the total R & D, so it is not a big head There have been rumors for a long time that large companies are not good at research, but good at clinical development, approval, and marketing, so they should be done by more creative small companies, while large companies focus on later work But this statement is rarely supported by reliable data, so it is not entirely credible There are indeed bureaucrats and inertia in large companies, but they also have sound R & D technical support and profound R & D experience Acquisition of high-quality R & D assets is not necessarily cheaper than their own Now immunotherapy companies only have early clinical assets with a market value of billions of dollars In addition, history shows that small innovation companies such as Amgen and Genentech did not sell their products to big companies, but became big companies themselves Therefore, it is inconsistent with the historical situation that big companies hope to seek development goals from stable supply market of high-quality new products without having to do their own research So far, there has been a large pharmaceutical factory without its own research department that can maintain its long-term prosperity Is this model applicable to some enterprises? Be on the cards Should all big pharmaceutical companies give up research and leave the task of finding new drugs to small companies? The answer is No One is that this is not necessarily an effective model for the whole industry because without a long-term stable R & D team, a wheel has to be repeatedly invented many times Second, this model can not be sustained Research companies with the ability to continuously discover new drugs will become big pharmaceutical companies instead of constantly making clothes for others