Bavarian Biotech Report 2011/2012 (7MB) - Bio M

prises. In addition, hardly a day passed in the news lastyear without a major pharmaceutical company announcingmassive restructuring with layoffs or the outsourcingof specific areas – or being forced to declare therejection of an approval study. At the same time, weobserved concrete examples of how the patent expirationof a blockbuster drug can lead to the almost completedrop in sales of a previous pillar of company successwithin a few days of being “attacked” by the genericdrugs – and therefore gained a much more concreteunderstanding of the patent cliff concept. An additionalamount of about US $ 80 billion of secure revenues willbe lost by 2014 due to further patent expirations atpharmaceutical companies (Bain & Company, 2011).Furthermore, the supply of new drugs is nowhere nearsufficient to close this gap. This holds true even though2011 showed a strongly rising number of approvals bythe FDA in the amount of about 30 new drugs, which ison a scale that has not been achieved during the last 10years. It remains to be seen whether the continuingdeclining trend or stagnation in the number of approveddrugs or also priority drugs in the past years has alreadybeen reversed or if this was just a one-time effect.enough so that setbacks on one end can be compensatedby success on the other end – and this also continuouslyprovides new opportunities for the employees.As a comparison – and the number of employees andsales revenues indicate this direction – the combinedpharmaceutical developers of the Bavarian Biotech Clusterare equivalent to a larger national pharmaceuticalcompany (see page 17f). However, the major differencebecomes particularly apparent when looking at the productpipeline of the Bavarian biotech companies: Not onlyis it unrivalled in Germany, but would not have beendeveloped by a single company that concentrates onindividual indications (see page 19f). On the other hand,such a classical company also sacrifices the broaderscope and its associated flexibility and effective riskmanagement in order to deal with failures. These failurescan be buffered in an – admittedly amorphous – environmentof a cluster in an ideal scenario. This can be comparedto how some animals in a school of fish or flock ofbirds move in the direction that turns out to be correctand were therefore rightly followed by the other partnersin the cluster.The strength of the German biotechnology industry inthe pharmaceutical sector is its broad and very promisingpipeline that the Bavarian companies have largely coveredand developed.The year 2011 has presented much positive progress inearly clinical stages: It was even possible for the Leverkusen-basedBiofrontera com pany to celebrate the longdesiredEuropean approval of its 5-aminolevulinic acidactive substance. Now it still needs to assert itself in themarket. Nevertheless, not all product developments byGerman – and also Bavarian – biotech companies havebeen successful in their critical approval study. On theother hand, especially the Bavarian biotechnologysector is fortunate to bediversifiedA few years ago, one of these new directions was focusingon technology platforms – true know-how ownershipthat allowed individual companies to present themselvesas suppliers and technology service providers tothe pharmaceutical industry and establish a permanentpresence in their global value chains. Prior to this, thesomewhat painful realisation had set in that hardly anyof the German Biotech SMEs could develop into BigBiotech on their own and that an innovative, researchintensivesupplier industry – especially in drug development– could expand in a way similar to the automotivesector.9