BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Chiron: Partnering its dominance

June 24, 2002 7:00 AM UTC

Developing therapeutics for hepatitis C virus is so hard that Chiron Corp. has not been bashful about licensing rights giving just about all comers a crack at it. Last week, Merck and Co. Inc. became the seventh pharma company to which CHIR has licensed therapeutic HCV rights.

According to Bill Green, president of Chiron Blood Testing and general counsel, "we have non-exclusively licensed the HCV technology on an all-comer basis due to the fact that this is a hard problem to solve - no one knows who will be the first to figure it out. Having as many people working on it as possible is best from a therapeutic public health perspective and it provides opportunities to gain revenues."...