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The fragmentation of biopharmaceutical innovation

  1. Katarzyna Smietana

    1. McKinsey & Company, Wroclaw, Poland.

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  2. David Quigley

    1. McKinsey & Company, New York, NY, USA.

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  3. Bart Van de Vyver

    1. McKinsey & Company, Geneva, Switzerland.

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  4. Martin Møller

    1. McKinsey & Company, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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In the pharmaceutical industry, there are typically 50–120 consolidative deals each year through which two companies become a single entity (Fig. 1). So, it could be reasonable to assume that the industry is consolidating over time. However, in this article we present data that indicate that this is not the case. We also analyse the drivers and discuss the implications for the industry.

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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 19, 17-18 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-019-00046-3

Acknowledgements

The authors thank A. Halczuk for help with some of the analyses.

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 29 April 2019: The article has been updated to include a reference to a previous study on fragmentation in the biopharmaceutical industry by Goldsmith and Varela (Drug Discov. Today 22, 433–439; 2017).

Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary Box 1

Competing Interests

All authors of this article are employees of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy that works with the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies on innovation issues. The analysis in this study was funded by McKinsey's Pharmaceuticals and Medical Products practice and undertaken independently of any other organizations.

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