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  • FROM THE ANALYST'S COUCH
  • Clarification 06 July 2023

Investigating the origins of recent pharmaceutical innovation

  1. Alexander Schuhmacher

    1. University of St. Gallen, Institute of Technology Management, St Gallen, Switzerland; THI Business School, Ingolstadt, Germany.

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  2. Markus Hinder

    1. Novartis, Basel, Switzerland.

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  3. Alexander Dodel

    1. University of St. Gallen, Institute of Technology Management, St Gallen, Switzerland; Johnson & Johnson, Allschwil, Switzerland.

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  4. Oliver Gassmann

    1. University of St. Gallen, Institute of Technology Management, St Gallen, Switzerland.

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  5. Dominik Hartl

    1. Granite Bio, Basel, Switzerland; Department of Pediatrics, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.

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Leading pharmaceutical companies have historically been engaged in all stages of the R&D pipeline, from target identification through to drug marketing, and thus have been termed fully integrated pharmaceutical companies (FIPCOs). In the past decade, externally invented assets gained through partnering or mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become a prominent component of the pipelines of such companies. Given the long development cycles and the increasing level of collaboration between pharma companies and biotech companies, however, the precise origins of innovation are not obvious, in part as regulatory approvals for innovative drugs by agencies such as the FDA are granted to the company filing the applications, which is not necessarily the company that discovered the active pharmaceutical ingredient.

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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 22, 781-782 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-023-00102-z

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 06 July 2023: It has been clarified in Table 1 that three of the top 20 biopharma companies (Amgen, Biogen and Gilead Sciences) are defined as biotech companies founded after 1976 in the analyses presented in the article, such as those shown in Figure 1b and 1c. For full details of how each drug is assigned on the basis of company type, see Supplementary Table 2.

Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary information
  2. Supplementary Fig. 1

Competing Interests

A.S. and O.G. declare no competing interests. M.H. is an employee of Novartis and a former employee of Roche and Sanofi. D.H. is a former employee of Roche and Novartis. A.D. is an employee of Johnson & Johnson. This study did not receive external funding and was undertaken independently.

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