Jim Miller
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The pharmaceutical industry—and by extension the pharmaceutical services business—was once thought to be immune from general
economic cycles, but that's not the case this time. The current global economic crisis, set off by the unwillingness or inability
of financial institutions to make funding available to companies, has cut deeply into the prospects for contract research
and manufacturing organizations (CROs and CMOs) for 2009 and probably beyond.
The industry outlook has changed from rosy to glum in a remarkably short period of time. Less than six months ago, we reported
that the respondents to the 2008 PharmSource–Pharmaceutical Technology Outsourcing Survey were optimistic about their 2009 prospects. Nearly 70% of participants from contract services companies
expected 2009 to be better than 2008, and a similar share of biopharmaceutical and pharmaceutical company respondents expected
their outsourced expenditures to grow in 2009.
The financial crisis is putting an end to those expectations. Service providers that offer early research and development
services, including discovery, preclinical toxicology, process development, and clinical-supplies manufacture, are reporting
steep downturns in business activity, and a sharp increase in project cancellations and delays.
Early-development hit
The primary culprit behind this gloomy picture is the uncertainty of funding for early-stage companies. Traditional funding
sources such as initial public offerings (IPOs), follow-on stock offerings, and debt have nearly dried up. Venture capital
flows have held steady at about $1 billion per quarter, but investors are funneling money to companies in which they already
have investments rather than spreading it around. That's because they want to ensure that the most promising candidates in
their portfolio companies continue to progress, and because new investors would insist on terms that would greatly dilute
the equity positions of the early investors.
To conserve funds, early-stage companies with multiple product candidates are being forced to shelve less developed candidates.
They are focusing instead on candidates with the nearest and best prospects for commercial approval or out-licensing. Start-up
projects are having a difficult time finding any funding.
The demand downturn has been compounded by major pharmaceutical companies' efforts to reduce costs even as they increase outsourcing.
Big Pharma is exiting entire therapeutic areas and halting early-stage projects in those areas. For continuing programs, they
are aggressively looking for ways to cut development expenditures before demonstrating proof of concept.
Further, most major pharmaceutical companies have established global sourcing units that are pursuing strategies to reduce
outsourcing costs by standardizing processes and reducing the number of vendors that must be qualified, audited, and managed.
These programs started five years ago in the clinical CRO realm and resulted in companies reducing the number of CROs they
work with by as much as 80%. We expect to see a similar pattern for outsourced formulation and manufacturing services. This
changing environment is hitting especially hard those CROs and CMOs that focus on early development because there are fewer
candidates and less money to spend. Late-stage development has not been affected as much and contract backlogs at clinical
CROs continue to rise.
Looking ahead
It's hard to say how long this environment may last. No one knows how the financial and economic crisis will evolve and when
the funding situation for early pharma will improve. The impact on the product pipeline is likely to be longterm, however.
When the financial markets were flush with cash, many companies and projects received funding that would not have if proper
due diligence had been carried out. They got the green light because venture capital investors had to put their large pools
of money to work. Now, products and companies with marginal chances of success (and many that may be promising, as well) are
not being funded. Thus, the decline in early-stage compounds could be sustained for several years.
Moreover, a higher percentage of remaining development candidates will be placed in the hands of major biopharmaceutical and
pharmaceutical companies. Most of the largest companies have substantial caches of cash (Pfizer alone has more than $26 billion
in the bank). These companies have been eager buyers of promising early-stage companies and licensees of promising products
and technologies. They have bid up valuations to historic levels. Now, with early-stage companies desperate for funding and
their valuations collapsing, the cash-rich major pharmaceutical companies are widely expected to step up their acquisitions.
