As the pharmaceutical industry continues to explore new ways to stimulate innovation, reduce costs, and streamline operations, the idea of joining forces in cross-pharma collaborations on the development of new and valuable precompetitive technologies becomes increasingly attractive. Before industry-wide precompetitive collaboration can become truly commonplace and more effective, improved approaches for creating and maintaining collaborations between competitors are needed. A recent Council for Chemical Research workshop at the University of Pennsylvania on precompetitive collaborations on enabling chemical and chemical engineering technologies for the pharmaceutical industry revealed widespread interest among participants from industry, academia and government to augment and improve current methods. While it is important not to underestimate the challenges of multiparty collaborations, the value coming from pooling resources and combining intellectual input provides strong incentive to improve and foster precompetitive collaborations. Here we summarize key points from this discussion and propose a new hybrid model for improved collaborative development of new enabling technologies for the pharmaceutical industry.
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