Title

Pathways Across the Valley of Death: Novel Intellectual Property Strategies for Accelerated Drug Discovery

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2006

Abstract

The problem of stagnation in drug discovery is highly visible. Government agencies, industry analysts, and industry scientists have all pointed to the reality that, despite significant increases in pharmaceutical R&D funding, the production of fundamentally new drugs - particularly drugs that work on new biological pathways and proteins - remains disappointingly low. To some extent, pharmaceutical firms are already embracing the prescription of new, more collaborative R&D organizational models suggested by industry analysts. In this paper, we build on collaborative strategies that firms are already employing by proposing a novel public-private collaboration that would move upstream academic research "across the valley of death" into downstream drug candidates.