Biopharma licensing and M&A trends in the 21st-century landscape

Abstract

The declining in-house R&D productivity has compelled the biopharmaceutical firms to supplement their innovation pipelines with well-managed licensing or acquisition deals. The reliance on licensed products and acquired technologies continues to increase across the industry to support pipeline expansion and technological diversification. In this article, Licensing and M&A trends across the biopharmaceutical industry are explored by examining the partnering activities of major biopharmaceutical companies and analyzing the trends in the business development transactions of the biotechnology companies worldwide. The information has been extracted from public and proprietary sources such as company annual reports, Industry reports and press releases from biopharmaceutical companies. The transactions data and partnership information has been analyzed over a contiguous twenty-year time period of 2000–2020 to understand the change in strategic focus in dealmaking and trends over the past two decades.