Drug Repositioning Strategies - Serendipity by design

Drug repositioning has several advantages over traditional discovery-reduced cost, risk and time to market-compared with traditional discovery, providing an attractive prospect for Big Pharma, scrambling to fill pipelines in an increasingly harsh market environment. As competition to inlicense candidates drives the price of this strategy up, repositioning presents a cost effective alternative.

Despite increasing R&D investment, productivity has been declining, at a time when Big Pharma is contending with latestage pipeline failures and more rigorous drug approval procedures, in addition to external challenges in the form of generic competition and pricing pressures.

The cost savings, accelerated path to market, and lower risks that repositioning brings relative to traditional discovery are attractive to Big Pharma, which has thus far been filling pipeline gaps by inlicensing, a practice which has become more expensive as competition for candidates increases.

The companies involved in repositioning currently differ greatly in the methodologies used, in addition to their disease focus, however as the strategy gains traction, the industry is likely to undergo considerable consolidation.

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