White Papers
White papers and articles published by PharmaVentures' advisors and analysts.
Competitive Deal Activity Profiling (CDAP©)
Deal-making is one of the key strategies employed by pharma companies to fuel growth opportunities. On a spectrum that ranges from intramural organic growth to extramural outright acquisitions, deal-making occupies an intermediate position. One can easily argue that analogous to semi-active investment, this approach should yield highest return for the company as well as its investors on a risk-normalised basis.
White Paper - Options: Is the Bio/Pharma Industry Becoming More Risk Averse?
In deal-making, options have long been considered a useful vehicle to carry uncertainty through to a point of resolution, or at least to a position of more understandable risk. Many very early stage players prefer the use of options to allow partners an opportunity to uncover value rather than undersell or worse allow good potential to gather dust for lack of resource. Would-be licensees see options as a lower risk / lower cost way of securing assets, seeing the risk reward balance falling in favour of watchful waiting.
Co-promotion Deals - Panacea or Poison Pill?
The incidence of co-promotion components in biotechnology/pharmaceutical licensing deals for development products has grown steadily since 1996 according to data from PharmaDeals© V4. In 1996 just 6% of licensing deals retained co-promotion rights or options for licensors, to date in 2010 the frequency is double that (12%). We were interested to uncover if these agreements converted into commercial realities and if so did they turn out to be mutual successes for the concerned parties.
Pharmaceutical Royalties in Licensing Deals: No Place for the 25% Rule of Thumb
The 25% rule of thumb is often quoted in the context of licensing royalty rates and in particular when deriving an appropriate rate of income due to a licensor for an innovative intellectual property asset. We have set out to conduct an in-depth analysis of historic market data from the pharmaceutical industry going back over ten years to check on the validity of this concept and found little if any evidence of its use, appropriateness or relevance. An abundance of anecdotal references and attempts can be found to make deal making data fit this incongruous notion, and which does not have a sufficiently robust foundation to make its utility appropriate in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector. Our conclusion shows that this rule has no suitable place in the arsenal of licensing executives.