This week, a deal far away from home helped bring closer to home one of the challenges facing the biotech industry [1]. Abbott labs bought a unit of India’s Piramal healthcare, moving further into the generics business (at least in emerging markets).
The recent introduction of generic Lipitor in Canada [2] is one example of the challenges facing pharma companies as current blockbusters come off patent and face generic competition. A lot of commenters have been expecting that challenge to turn into more money spent by pharma companies on biotech; but the Abbott-Piramal transaction emphasized that there’s more than one way for pharma companies to replace the lost revenue. Pharma companies facing generics competition will not save biotech companies [3].
Of course, by-and-large, blogging will not save biotech companies either; so I was out of pocket most of last week working on this deal [4]. Now that I’m closer to my home again, stay tuned to The Cross-Border Biotech Blog [5] and @crossborderbio [6] for more updates.