They call themselves CEOs, but really they are department managers

In this recent video from Biotech Showcase 2011. My good friend Stan Yakatan provides his perspectives on his decades spent in the biotechnology industry. Check it out; he’s got some excellent insights.


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  1. stan yakatan
      February 26, 2011

    Decades

  2. Stefano Cottignoli
      March 4, 2011

    Interesting interview.
    I am far from being an expert in the field, but my feeling is that this concept that pharma R&D is not working or is not efficient may be deceiving.
    It is true what Mr. Yakatan said, getting a drug is like winning the lottery.
    In the last years a huge amount of public money have been poured in drug discovery in academic labs in western countries. And lot of researchers used this money to start entrepreneurial projects later on backed by venture capital or pharma corporate equity.
    In other words they got lot of money to buy “tickets” and somebody won, but did they really improve the odds to win?
    I don’t have the statistics here, but I would bet that if we look at the average ROI of drug discovery in small biotech is not gonna be much better than the one in big pharma.
    The difference is that big pharmas are re-organizing their R&D, investing lot of money to improve the process (i.e. using cutting edge informatics tools to predict which drug will make it or not), in other words they are really trying to figure out how to buy the winning tickets.
    On the other side small biotech don’t have the possibility to methodically improve their decision making process and it will be interesting to see in the next years if they will be really able to keep their current role in the industry.

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