Global Biotech Industry Faces Tight Funding - Ernst & Young

KUALA LUMPUR, June 19 (Bernama)-- The growth of the global biotechnology industry remains challenging with tight funding straining the traditional drug development model despite the industry's financial performance stabilising. Ernst & Young said in its "Beyond Borders: Global Biotechnology Report 2012" that the industry globally showed a second straight year of increasingly stable financial performance in 2011. "For the first time since the start of the global financial crisis, the established biotech markets registered more than 10 per cent revenue growth," it said in a statement on Tuesday. "However, longer-term sustainability remains challenging, with the traditional funding-and-innovation model for pre-commercial biotech firms under unprecedented strain and the industry’s efforts to date to “do more with less” uncertain to deliver significant productivity gains," it addded. Ernst & Young’s Global Life Sciences Leader Glen Giovannetti said: "In this capital-constrained environment, the inefficiency and duplication of the drug research and development (R&D) paradigm is an indulgence we can no longer afford. "More than ever, the industry needs to remove duplication, encourage pre-competitive collaboration, pool data and allow researchers to learn in real time." To shift the R&D paradigm, companies need to recognise that in some situations sharing information may create more value than protecting it in order to sustain innovation in the industy, he added. --BERNAMA