RE: big pharma buying BT pipelines
There is an issue of scale to be considered here. Big pharma pipelines are generally dubbed "weak" because the products in development are insufficient to maintain or accelerate earnings growth not necessarily because the assets themselves are poor quality. Big pharma is trying to grow from a large base, e.g., BMY sales = $20B, LLY sales = $12B, so an in-house pipeline that can't deliver additional billions of sales in a timely fashion is considered inadequate. Nonetheless, I would bet that many BT CEOs would be very happy to have a "weak" big pharma pipeline to manage.
IMO, big pharma has generally favored in-licensing / co-development approaches with BT companies because pharma is interested in the one compound that is a strategic fit or has great potential. Buying the rest of the company is generally more complicated & expensive, brings in unnecessary or unwanted assets, can lead to culture clashes, may create headaches to clean up on-going programs, etc. In recent history there are only 2 outright BT purchases I remember, J&J buying Centocor and Merck buying Rosetta. There must be a few others.
Of course at some point the companies themselves become too cheap to ignore -- we have been painfully headed in that direction for too long. So maybe we will see more M&A activity. It would certainly give the sector a much needed boost.
HM |
