Maximising Pharmaceutical Research by Collaboration

摘要

Research and development (R&D) is the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical industry as companies must have a steady flow of new medicines coming through the pipeline to survive. It has become increasingly clear that not even the largest multinational pharmaceutical company can hope to do all its research in-house. Instead, there has been a dramatic increase in alliances between large multinational companies and scientists in both academia and the burgeoning biotechnology sector. Discovery and development of new therapeutics nowadays require the involvement of a wide range of disciplines. To complement Novartis's own in-house efforts the company is establishing links with groups that have particular expertise in platform technologies - areas of expertise that provide the basic scientific input into drug discovery - such as functional genomics, combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening.