Building Value Through Biotechnology Partnering

It is critical for early stage biotechnology companies to build long-term sustainable value. 'Early stage' is intended to include any company - public or private - without recurring revenue from product sales, so the vast majority of biotech companies are included in this definition. Everyone seeks high value partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, but either companies partner early, giving away a very significant portion of their long-term value, or they fail to build the full range of capabilities in a timely manner to enable the underlying value of their technology to be realised. In addition, pharma-biotech collaborations are challenging to manage, not least because of the significant cultural differences between the two types of organisation. Collaborations between biotechs offer a means of rapidly building value, but often these biotech-biotech deals fail to deliver. In this article, pharma-biotech and biotech-biotech collaborations are analysed, common reasons for failure are identified, and some models for successful biotech-biotech collaborations are discussed.