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Avoiding premature licensing

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 5, pages 985–986 (2006)Cite this article

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 01 February 2007

Since its inception, the biotechnology industry has faced the challenge of financing the tremendously costly activities of novel drug development. Historically, venture capital and government grants have been the primary funding source for start-up and discovery-stage drug development efforts, while the public equity and debt markets, and large pharma's chequebook, have been instrumental in the financing of late-stage clinical programmes that are significantly less risky. Despite this relatively stable funding environment for very early and very late-stage programmes, mid-stage development programmes — those that are undergoing Phase I and II clinical trials — have been stuck in what amounts to a financial no-man's land.

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Figure 1: Value of biotech out-licensing deals.
Figure 2: Example of a collaborative development financing structure.
Figure 3: Illustrative value creation through collaborative development financing.

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  1. Managing Director and Sam Hall is an Associate at Symphony Capital LLC, 875 Third Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, 10022, New York, USA

    Mark Kessel & Sam Hall

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  1. Mark Kessel
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  2. Sam Hall
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Competing interests

As a result of the financings completed by Symphony Capital Partners and its affiliates listed in Table 1, Mark Kessel and Sam Hall have certain economic interests in the biotech companies listed therein and the respective collaborative partnering companies developing those indications.

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Kessel, M., Hall, S. Avoiding premature licensing. Nat Rev Drug Discov 5, 985–986 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd2203

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