FDAnews Drug Daily Bulletin

Co-Promotes: No Longer Biotech’s Holy Grail (The IN VIVO Blog)
In her blog, Melanie Senior writes about co-promotions in the wake of news that Idenix was ending its agreement with Novartis for the hepatitis B drug Tyzeka.

Senior writes, “Co-promotes have until recently been most biotech’s holy grail, and co-promote options, at least, a sine qua non of much of recent licensing activity with larger pharma. It’s all part of that fully-integrated, ‘we-want-to-become-the-next-Genentech’ dream; we wrote about whether the dream made real-world commercial sense in IN VIVO in April.

“We also pointed to data showing that barely more than a tenth of biotech-pharma co-promote plans become reality. When they do, they can be a nightmare — there was certainly no love lost between ICOS and Eli Lilly over Cialis before that (inevitable) acquisition.”