Creating a Pharma Interest Navigator

It takes a village to develop a drug.

While the old-school, all-in-house method of drug development still posts big wins from time to time - including GLP-1s most recently - it’s now far more likely that a next-generation drug or modality was invented and developed elsewhere. Humira was developed at Cambridge. CAR-T at Penn. CRISPR-based gene editing at Stanford and the Broad. The list goes on.

At the top of the value chain are academic institutions. They play a crucial role in basic and translational research, generating the discoveries that lay the foundation for new therapies. Next come biotech startups created to spin out the science and bring it to market. These companies are agile and able to survive at the fast, messy forefront of cutting-edge research. Finally, corporate pharma brings development to the finish line by manufacturing at scale, running massive clinical trials, and organizing big, complicated distribution channels. Today, the typical drug makes its way through all three groups - while also touching a host of specialist firms - before gaining approval and reaching patients

Understandably, collaborations between academia and industry are increasingly common, facilitating the transfer of knowledge and expertise that feeds the pharma development pipeline. For big pharma companies, identifying and acquiring innovative technologies from academic institutions and emerging biotechs will likely remain a key part of their strategy in order to stay competitive and enhance their product pipelines. These partnerships enable access to cutting-edge technologies to expand portfolio while limiting time, cost, and risk.

Corporate pharmas have taken to publishing their areas of therapeutic focus publicly, in order to communicate their interests up the value chain. Sharing this information fosters an open innovation ecosystem, encouraging scientists and entrepreneurs to approach these companies with relevant discoveries and technologies. This benefits both translation-focused researchers in academia, early discovery-focused biotechs, as well as pharma through streamlined collaboration processes, driving licensing agreements / acquisitions. The problem for early-stage innovators, and those that support them, is that this information is often hard to find, inconsistent, and out-of-date.

Seeing the value of having all of this information organized in one place, we undertook to create a Pharma Interest Navigator. Here’s how we did it:

Creating a Pharma Areas of Interest Navigator

1. Develop an Areas of Interest Taxonomy

First, we created a taxonomy to categorize and structure the array of pharma interest areas into a single coherent system. Our hierarchical structure starts with the therapeutic area, narrows down to disease categories and further into disease subcategories. We broke our taxonomy into the following therapeutic areas: Cardiovascular Health, Dermatology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Hematology, Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Nephrology, Neurology, Oncology, Ophthalmology, Rare Diseases, Respiratory Diseases, Rheumatology, Urology, Women’s Health. An example of the Neurology therapeutic area system is below:

Figure 1: The structure of the neurology therapeutic area with disease categories and subcategories outlined.

2. Capture the list of pharma companies

Second, we focused our analysis on the top 45 pharma companies by market capitalization, with non-pharma companies removed during manual review. Our selection criterion was also influenced by the availability of public information and their influence on market trends and acquisitions.

Figure 2: Sample of companies included in the analysis.

3. Map each pharma company's areas of interest

Third, we mapped each pharma company’s interest areas by collecting publicly available information - often via their BD or partnering publications. Depending on how the company displays this information, we also captured or intuited areas of interest from partnered and pipeline technologies. While the detail of the information varies by company - some describe the disease subcategory level in detail and others provide a more general overview - we were able to collect information on the subcategory level in order to enable summarizing interest areas across all.

As we reviewed public information, we also identified disease subcategories not included in the initial taxonomy. We added these for completeness of the hierarchy, and will continue to do so as we support this tool.

4. Visualize for conclusions

Lastly, we created a simple web app to visualize the collected data to draw conclusions about interest areas of the pharmaceutical industry and opportunities for the innovation-driving academic players and biotech companies. This step helps identify specific areas where pharma companies are keen to innovate, guiding potential alignments for new technologies.

Figure 3: Views available on the pharma areas of interest and relevant companies.

Conclusion

The uses for our Pharma Interest Navigator are many. It can aid early-stage innovators in orienting their discoveries toward areas of unmet need. It can aid academic institutions and venture funds in matching their portfolios with potential partners. And when linked with an innovation discovery model, like Stargaze Innovation Atlas, it can help universities and pharmaceutical companies groups to quickly screen and match RisingStar innovators to pharma companies.

To access the navigator for free, just sign up to become a Stargaze Astronomer using the button below, and select “Pharma Interest Navigator.” We’d love your feedback as we continue to refine this tool for our community.

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