BioInvestor

Big Pharma Pipelines Failing to Meet Expectations

I’ll add a comment here. It’s an area that would be very, very easy for analysts to investigate: contact manufacturers, specifically companies that produce material for clinical trials, phases I and II. It takes very little investigation to discover that pilot plants—the plants that produce such material—are full. In fact, pilot plants in contract manufacturers haven’t been as full for over ten years. More significantly, perhaps, is that following a surge of investment in the late 90s, there is much more capacity in the industry today than there was ten or more years ago—by a factor of three or more. While a lot of this capacity in the outsourcing industry appears to be dedicated to emerging pharma, it’s significant in that many of these drugs find there way into the pipelines of major pharmaceutical companies. While the short term pipeline of major pharma looks bad, in the longer term, five plus years, I’d be a lot more sanguine about the recovery of the industry.