ABSTRACT
The pharmaceutical industry continues to face a number of sig-
nificant challenges to its conventional R&D model and commercial
strategies. There is a high attrition rate of compounds in phase 2
clinical trials; the gap between drug discovery and development
is hindering innovation and the speed of compounds through the
development pathway; companies are more than ever reliant on
externally sourced knowledge and expertise in life science; and
better access to patients and tissue samples is needed to exploit
newmethods to improve the safety and efficacy profiles of therapies
[1]. Furthermore, a significant and often ignored challenge is what
might be termed the “problem of maturity”; that is, drugs have
already been developed for the easy targets and now that they are
off-patent, they no longer attract the high profit margins necessary
for sustainable growth [2]. In response to these challenges of
sustainable innovation, amongst many others, large pharmaceutical
firms have, in addition to recurrent waves of merger, acquisition,
and strategic alliance behaviour [3,1], embraced the concept and
underlying principles of translational medicine (TM) and entered
a new experimental phase as they test different commercial and
R&Dmodels and strategic options. In particular, firms have sought to
exploit interdisciplinary and collaborative research to complement
in-house R&D and enable them to better access new science
and technology and plug some of the translational gaps that
threaten to undermine the conventional pharmaceutical business
model that has predominated for decades. One key trend has
been the development of public-private partnerships to facilitate
the translation of novel compounds from bench to bedside. Such
models require that a number of different organizations, often with
diverse agendas, goals, and expectations, work together and share
knowledge, resources, and expertise to improve the success rate of
drug discovery and development.
