BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Deconstructing de-risking

June 7, 2004 7:00 AM UTC

The biotech industry has seen its share of hot business models over the last 25 years. And just as generals have a tendency to build armies to fight the last war, these business models are often a reaction to the shortcomings of the favored model of the previous cycle.

This is no less true of the current infatuation with the no-research, development-only model, a "de-risked" approach that avoids discovery in favor of reprofiling, reformulating, recombining, or simply in-licensing existing compounds in an attempt to get to market - or IPO - faster than through biological discovery, target identification and validation, and lead identification...