{"id":151557,"date":"2010-01-07T15:20:11","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T20:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.33134"},"modified":"2010-01-07T15:08:15","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T20:08:15","slug":"are-big-pharma-mergers-good-for-new-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/151557","title":{"rendered":"Are Big Pharma Mergers Good for New Drugs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Merck and Schering-Plough, Wyeth and Pfizer. . .well, OK, everybody and Pfizer. There have been plenty of big mergers over the last few years in the drug industry, and they’ve always been accompanied by talk of economies of scale, critical mass, synergies, incredible opportunities that will come from merging two wonderful research pipelines and terrific development organizations. It’s enough to make you think that these things are good ideas.<\/p>\n

Until you look at the numbers, that is
A researcher named Bernard Munos at Eli Lilly has done that, though,
\nand reports his results in a well-respected industry forum, Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery<\/i>.
\nThe reality is much closer to the one reported by the grumbling
\nscientists at these companies, rather than the one inhabited by the
\nCEOs. Companies that have gone through big mergers have been
\nunderperforming the industry averages for development of new drugs, not
\nthe other way around. Shareholders should perhaps take note next time
\nthey’re asked to approve another one of these deals.<\/p>\n

In fact,
\none of Muno’s main conclusions is that very little that drug companies
\nhave done over the last 60 years seems to have affected the underlying
\nrate of drug discovery. That process, in fact, models best as an
\nessentially random one, impervious to the best schemes of scientists
\nand MBAs alike. It’s possible that a number of factors have fought to a
\ndraw to make the figures come out that way, but several others have
\nalso remained static – the chances of a new molecule becoming a
\nblockbuster, for example. One thing that hasn’t stayed the same,
\nthough, is the cost of finding these drugs. Munos estimates that that’s
\nbeen going up at about 13% a year since the 1950s, and that trend shows
\nno sign of slowing down.<\/p>\n

Derek Lowe blogs from inside the drug labs at In the Pipeline<\/a>.<\/i>


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Merck and Schering-Plough, Wyeth and Pfizer. . .well, OK, everybody and Pfizer. There have been plenty of big mergers over the last few years in the drug industry, and they’ve always been accompanied by talk of economies of scale, critical mass, synergies, incredible opportunities that will come from merging two wonderful research pipelines and terrific […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}