Leading pharmaceutical companies have historically been engaged in all stages of the R&D pipeline, from target identification through to drug marketing, and thus have been termed fully integrated pharmaceutical companies (FIPCOs). In the past decade, externally invented assets gained through partnering or mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become a prominent component of the pipelines of such companies. Given the long development cycles and the increasing level of collaboration between pharma companies and biotech companies, however, the precise origins of innovation are not obvious, in part as regulatory approvals for innovative drugs by agencies such as the FDA are granted to the company filing the applications, which is not necessarily the company that discovered the active pharmaceutical ingredient.
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Competing Interests
A.S. and O.G. declare no competing interests. M.H. is an employee of Novartis and a former employee of Roche and Sanofi. D.H. is a former employee of Roche and Novartis. A.D. is an employee of Johnson & Johnson. This study did not receive external funding and was undertaken independently.