Comment on New University-Industry Collaborations

Kevin Buckley — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:51:19 GMT

Thanks Jenny,

A "drug pipeline" refers to the process and number of experimental medicines that a company seeks to bring to market. It takes many years for drug candidates to be isolated, then tested in pre-clinical trials, then regulated, then marketed, and so on. The different steps of the regulatory process, e.g. conducting clinical trials to satisfy the FDA that the experimental medicines are safe and effective, are an important part of the of the process. The following picture describes Pfizer's pipeline, I believe the largest in the world, and also includes the different phases of the FDA regulatory process:

As you can see, Pfizer has 85 experimental medicines in its pipeline -- that's huge! -- and more information is available at www.pfizer.com/pipeline.

So far as my using all industry-sponsored basic research as a proxy for the subset of biotechnology sponsored research, the National Science Foundation suggests that biotechnology is the largest component of industry sponsored research:

"The industries that invest the most in basic research are those whose new products are most directly tied to recent advances in [science and technology], such as the pharmaceuticals industry and the scientific R&D services industry…which consists largely of biotechnology companies, contract research organizations, and early-stage technology firms."

My use of the numbers for all industry-sponsored basic research is not perfect, but likely does a fair job approximating industry-sponsored biotech research. For a review of all the data I reviewed, you can visit the NSF web site.

Finally, I checked into "astro-aeronautical" technologies and could only find the following reference:

It seems that Astro has indeed invented some sort of contraption -- it might be "aeronautical", but then again I'm just a simple biotech guy -- that is both wired and wireless! Strange device... but what a good looking pup!

Comment on New University-Industry Collaborations

Jenny — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:25:51 GMT

I have two questions: What is a drug pipeline? And why is the graph that shows industry-funded research for all technologies "a good proxy for biotechnologies" -- could you explain what the correlation is? Because I can imagine computer technology (or medical-equipment technology, or astro-aeronautical technology) research funding to be much different than biotechnology research funding, for example. Different sources, different expectations, different timetables, etc.

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Comment on New University-Industry Collaborations

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