The Role of Small- or Medium-Sized Enterprises in Drug Discovery

The past 10 years has seen the rise of large numbers of small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) engaging in some or many of the aspects of drug research. Few of these companies have been able to take candidate drugs to market due to development costs not being met by funding opportunities, but those companies that have been able to challenge traditional big pharma in the marketplace. Most SMEs have instead supplied traditional pharma with pipeline candidate drugs, either by licensing them or by the large companies actually acquiring the whole of the SME which owns the intellectual property. Many other companies engage in providing traditional big pharma or other SMEs with technologies and services. Hundreds of such companies have arisen, many clustered around centres of academic excellence on the coasts of the USA, or in certain regions in Europe and Asia – such clustering of scientific prowess has changed the location of where even big pharma tends to perform its research. By 2006, a large proportion (but generally less than 50%) of new drugs could be track to an origin in an SME, trends indicate that the proportion will rise even though the common prediction that large pharma will abandon internal research in favour of in-licensing from SMEs remains far from reality.