Abstract

The problem of stagnation in drug discovery is highly visible. Government agencies, industry analysts, and industry scientists have all pointed to the reality that, despite significant increases in pharmaceutical R&D funding, the production of fundamentally new drugs - particularly drugs that work on new biological pathways and proteins - remains disappointingly low. To some extent, pharmaceutical firms are already embracing the prescription of new, more collaborative R&D organizational models suggested by industry analysts. In this paper, we build on collaborative strategies that firms are already employing by proposing a novel public-private collaboration that would move upstream academic research "across the valley of death" into downstream drug candidates.