The industry’s focus on living human beings and highly controlled standards make it a unique challenge for business leaders. These features also go to these guys make the industry a natural incubator for innovations, which has led to major breakthroughs that have improved yields in agriculture, produced biofuels and led to life-saving pharmaceutical products.
When it comes to strategies that generate revenue, biotech start-ups have many options. The majority opt for a technology partnership or an asset creation-and-out licensing strategy. Technology-based partnerships can produce more revenue and lower risk to the financials, whereas assets creation and outlicensing strategies are able to yield much higher returns. A growing number of biotechs that are in research phase operate an hybrid model that blends both approaches.
If you choose to go with a product-oriented development strategy will succeed commercially when they are able to get their pipeline up to the right stage and attract a large pharmaceutical partner or investor with a large sum of money. This could be a costly proposition. It is important to consider the balance between opportunistic strategies in taking advantage of outside resources and the appropriate scientific choices regarding the development of home-grown products.
Alternately, the “platform” model provides an alternative path to revenue. It’s a cheaper method than the development-oriented model, but it also involves substantial risk. In this model, a biotech owns and develops its platform technology, before partnering with big pharma companies to create a portfolio drug discovery projects that specifically target diseases (i.e., disease x in biology y). Advinus Therapeutics, among others have embraced this method.