Is biotech still alive?

Glaxo Joins J&J in $200 Million Fund With Index Ventures! Very interesting. Now it will be more chances to cross the Death Valley. But wait a minute: … to invest in early-stage biotechnology companies, a move that may entice venture capitalists back to the industry.

Well… You see, the intention is to support biotechnology. I don’t know what is better in terms of drug development productivity – nanotechnology or biotechnology, but biotechnology is not the best field for drug development. So we have encountered here simulation of drug development, an attempt to switch the paradigm to the less productive biotechnology field.

“Biotech has a very difficult time,” Stoffels said. “It’s very highly needed for the benefit of health care in the future, that capital flows into the biotech environment. Otherwise the innovation will dry up and that will be a problem for pharma.”

Sure! We have a biothech-bubble and they need to help agonizing sector by pumping in it a little bit fresh cash. Will it help that much? Scarcely:

The market for initial public offerings, another way for companies to get funding, has also been sluggish. There were 29 biotechnology IPOs worldwide last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, down from 36 five years ago.

Moreover, there is an intention to patronize scientists, to take control over their ideas:

“We need to strategically identify the other great ideas that exist anywhere,” Slaoui said in an interview today before discussing the fund at the Bio-Europe Spring conference in Amsterdam. “Index is pretty smart because they’re accessing 30,000 scientists’ worth of due diligence and insight and judgment in terms of how they would see the ideas” by putting executives from two large drugmakers on the advisory board.

So, basically, we have an expected scenario for how Big Pharma will try to survive and take control over the situation.

The rhetoric is logical and quite optimistic despite the fact that in reality Big Pharma’s approach to productive drug development process is one very big mistake:

More cooperation is needed among companies and scientists to make research more efficient and avoid repeating mistakes that others have made, Stoffels said.

“We have a lot of failures and successes in the past,” Stoffels said. “We can give some advice on where to invest and where not, if we have failed already.”