BMS to become a Biopharma Company?!
I came across this article recently and having worked for BMS years ago, I always find it interesting to see what the company is up to.
For Bristol, steady course may be best navigation
In the past I’ve not been very hot on some of the deal makings of BMS and I still have my doubts but converting into a biopharma is fraught with challenges.
In “The Development Factory: Unlocking the Potential of Process Innovation” (Gary P. Pisano) he talks about the pharmaceutical industry as one that” learns before doing”. By that he means that we can do some experiments in the lab and then somewhat reliably scale those up to large scale with some probability of success.
The biopharmaceutical industry on the other hands “learns by doing”. That is, the knowledge in how to scale these processes is not there and many things can go wrong when you change scale. Therefore you almost invariably have to run large scale experiments to figure out what parameters to control to give you the product you desire. This is one of the reasons that biopharmaceutical products are so much more expensive then your normal pill, tablet or capsule.
My point in bringing this up is it is hard to take a certain mindset and approach to development that has been instilled at BMS for a long time, and change that mentality i a short period of time and be successful at it. While they may have a chance, there still are no examples of big pharma becoming biopharma. There are examples of biopharma becoming big pharma or at least very big pharma-like (think Amgen and Genentech).
While I wish BMS the best (I still own a few shares of their stock as well as Genentech mentioned in this article) I don’t look for them to pull it off anytime soon and definitely not soon enough to become attractive prey for another big pharma.
Technorati Tags: BMS, Bristol-Myers Squibb, biopharma
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