The biotech revolution: Risks and opportunities of the growing trend

Recently, there has been a shift within the pharmaceutical industry veering its R&D away from the traditional corporate campuses and moving them to new collaborative biotech clusters. Nick Sutcliffe, life sciences patent expert and partner at Mewburn Ellis, discusses the risks and opportunities of the growing biotech cluster trend.

In recent years, we have seen biotech clusters become an increasingly important part of many pharmaceutical companies’ research and development strategies. Whereas major drugmakers used to carry projects through from cradle to grave on large research campuses, we are now observing a greater openness to collaboration and outside resources.

Given this trend and the benefits we are already witnessing, biotech clusters are likely to be major engines of pharma industry growth in the future. However, pharmaceutical companies may need to adapt their traditional approach to innovation in order to maximise the potential benefits.

Protecting pharmaceutical technology through strong patents is the lifeblood of the industry and provides the building blocks for complex collaborations, licenses and other deals. Although biotech clusters present a major opportunity for innovation, both biotech and pharma companies must consider the intellectual property issues that impact on collaborative approaches to drug development.

Working with third parties invariably leads to more complex and challenging intellectual property issues than would arise in in-house research programs. When operating in bio clusters, it is therefore vital that all parties establish ownership rights on their technology through patents at an early stage and use these patents to build the collaborative deals that bring new drugs to market.