Bio Partners are Looking Beyond Risks While Forging Alliances with Indian Companies

Bangalore, Karnataka, India

The central theme of this year's Bangalore Bio 2008 "Global Partnering" showcased some of the most successful and interesting Indian-International partnerships. In the session moderated by Dr. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson, Karnataka Vision Group on Biotechnology and CMD Bio Con, all the participants expressed their run-up for the partnerships and how both the partners are being benefited.

The panel was opinioned that although minimizing the risks is important but is no more the deciding factor in forging partnerships and alliances in the bio-technology sector. Several factors and criteria were listed out by the participants in the session on Biopartnering at the eighth edition of Bangalore Bio 2008. In fact, this year's overall theme of the event is 'Global Partnering'.

As the discovery process in the biotech sector is highly risky and one that consumes huge resources such as time, finance and skilled HR resources, there are other the key drivers for the partnerships in this segment which are somewhat different from those of other industries.

The following are some of the key drivers revealed by the participants - Sharing the risk, Confining to one's own domain expertise, Letting the partner use the expertise, which does not completely serve the main goal, Taking advantage of cost at the other geographical location and Plugging-in into such processes without needing to pay upfront for the patents that the partner is holding.

All the participants agreed that the partnerships formed with the above key drivers last long only when the selection criteria is based on - "A rational formula", "Expectations of both the partners" and "How well they work together."

"The factors change from country to country and so does the experience," said Denis Martin, Senior Project Manger, DNDi (Dugs for Neglected Diseases initiative), Switzerland. "DNDi partnered with Advinus Therapeutics of India. DNDi chose Advinus for its comprehensive capabilities from lead identification stage to the proof of concept," said Nimish Vachharajani, Vice President, Advinus.

In the case of the partnership with Merck, Nicholas Piramal India Ltd, got the benefit of using Merck's intellectual properties and expertise without having to incur any upfront costs like fees or royalty. It might have costed a US $100 million to Merck to set up a discovery project, but it costed Nicholas Piramal only US $ 20 million. In this partnership, we proved that partners can benefit from the core knowledge of the other partner's and reversed the paradigm of taking a license and paying for that, said Somesh Sharma, Chief Scientific officer, Niholas Piramal. This partnership in the field of oncology s based on sharing the risks and R&D capabilities, said Bharatt. M. Chowrira, Executive Director, Worldwide Licensing & External Research, Merck. This partnership opens the door for the possibility of an early proof of concept, he added.

"The partnership with Conexious Life Sciences is a kind of Jugalbandi", said Dr Swaminathan Subramaniam, Director-Business Developmnt Rheoscience- a Danish Biopharma company. "Though our partnership, we found a joint opportunity in diabetes and obesity targets. Our goal is to move quickly and identify early stage third party partnerships," said Suri Venkatachalam, CMD, Connexious Life Sciences.

The story of Avestagen and Danon Research is different. In this case, Avestagen has end- to-end capabilities from concept to clinical trial. It really does not need any partnership. But it went ahead and partnered with Danone Research as the latter wanted to be a leading player in disease-targeted nutrition. Danone can benefit from the capabilities of Avestagen from proof of concept to proof of efficiency, said Jean-Luc Tonneau, Strategic Planning Director, Danone Research. This type of collaboration can take the processes forward from the current level of capabilities, said Dr Parag Shaw, CEO, BioNutrition, Avestagen.

Source: Bangalore Bio 2008 (Business Wire India)

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