Trends of Business-to-Business Transactions to Develop Innovative Cancer Drugs

Abstract

<jats:p>A key concept in the pharmaceutical industry is open innovation, in which pharmaceutical companies contribute to human health and adapt to a changing business environment by acquiring external knowledge. As successful drug discoveries and developments have become challenging, pharmaceutical companies must proactively pursue the open innovation of new drugs through various inter-firm partnerships to be more sustainable. This study aims to interpret the trend of inter-firm partnerships in the development of cancer drugs and to evaluate their effectiveness by examining inter-firm transactions related to cancer drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is a novel approach to exercise this on each product instead of at the company level. The findings revealed that the number of inter-firm transactions in the oncology field has increased over the past 20 years. Furthermore, the annual number of transactions related to biologics has surpassed that of small molecules since 2015 and has been primarily driven by three PD-(L)1 inhibitors: Keytruda, Opdivo, and Tecentriq. Moreover, the average number of inter-firm transactions related to biologics is significantly higher than that of small molecules in total, in alliances, and in financing, suggesting that inter-firm transactions for biologic cancer drugs actively occur through various means. Additionally, a positive and significant correlation exists between the number of transactions and the average number of approved indications for biologics, but not for small molecules. These results suggest that the observed trend of active inter-firm transactions is key in increasing the probability of success in cancer drug research and development. This could provide a potential breakthrough in this industry for the successful development of innovative drug candidates to address unmet medical needs. Further study is necessary to confirm the applicability of this paradigm in broader drug discoveries and development.</jats:p>

Dynamic Collaborations for the Development of Immune Checkpoint Blockade Agents

“…As shown in Figure 2 , it was observed that the distribution of the effective transactions appears to present a “Gaussian” shape with the peak in 2017 while the sales trend keeps increasing even in 2019 [ 10 ]. Our previous study shows that that the observed distribution with the peak in 2017 is unique to pembrolizumab and nivolumab while other biologics and small molecules show different distribution of interorganizational transactions with peaks in different years.…”

“…Recently, R&D has become more complicated as modality becomes diverse by introducing new technologies and knowledge to address existing unmet medical needs in specific target populations. Thus, companies in the pharmaceutical industry have strived to enhance sustainability by adopting various strategic approaches, such as pursing globalized or region-oriented business models [ 5 , 6 ], selective therapeutic areas in R&D, optimizing R&D productivity [ 7 ], and open innovation, including external collaboration and interorganizational transactions [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. In particular, the importance of external collaboration in R&D has been disseminated and many pharmaceutical companies have pursued interorganizational transactions and established open innovation platforms to acquire external knowledge and pipelines across organizations [ 8 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ].…”

“…Medarex, which was a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, and potential commercialization of fully human antibody-based therapeutics and engineered ipilimumab and nivolumab, was acquired by BMS in 2009 [ 39 ]. Additionally, the development of combination therapy in this segment is quite active before and even after product launch [ 10 , 40 , 41 ] involving the collaboration of multiple companies. Given these previous successful practices, one of the effective approaches for sustainable business in the discovery and development of anticancer drugs may consider how a company that tries to generate a potential innovative drug can be a pioneer in terms of open innovation.…”

Business to business (B2B) alliances in the healthcare industry: a review of research trends and pertinent issues

“…Such a skew in the country context, however, indicates that the theoretical implication of these studies may be biased. Furthermore, we observed that the majority of these studies used the COMPUSTAT database, which implies that the data has also come primarily from the same source (Dan and Zondag, 2016; Djurian et al , 2020). Countries investigated at least twice in the short-listed studies are presented in Figure 3.…”

“…Within this body of literature, B2B relationships in industries such as health care have received notable attention (de Leeuw et al , 2019; Roijakkers et al , 2005). Interestingly, the majority of the existing studies on B2B relationships in health care have examined the R&D alliances of pharmaceuticals firms (Diestre and Rajagopalan, 2012; Djurian et al , 2020; Zeng et al , 2019). Although the literature is quite rich, it is difficult to grasp as the findings are scattered across publications and contexts.…”