The industry’s focus on living human beings and highly regulated standards create unique considerations for business leaders. These attributes make the industry an ideal platform for innovation. They have resulted in major breakthroughs in biofuels, agricultural yields and life-saving pharmaceuticals.
Biotech startups have a myriad of options when it comes down to revenue generation strategies, with most choosing either a technology partnering or an out-licensing and asset creation strategy. Technology-based partnerships can produce more revenue and lower financial risk, while assets creation and outlicensing strategies can yield significantly more returns. A increasing number of biotechs in the research stage use an approach that blends the two approaches.
If you choose to go with an approach to development that is oriented towards product can be successful commercially when they get their pipeline to a suitable stage and find a pharmaceutical partner or an investor with deep pockets. This is a costly investment. It is essential to balance the opportunistic approach of taking advantage of outside resources and the best scientific decisions for the development of home-grown products.
The “platform” model is another option to generate revenue. It is less expensive than product-oriented development, but is a risky option. In this model, a biotech owns and develops its platform technology, before joining with major pharma companies to generate a portfolio of drug discovery projects that are targeted at specific disease areas (i.e. disease the index x gene within biology y). This is the method Advinus Therapeutics and a few others have followed.