Who's Got Game in Antibody Development?

The handful of firms with established bioprocessing capabilities has dominating advantages in antibody drug development. Because process varies little from one antibody to another, they can wait for and quickly pounce on fast-follower opportunities, expanding production capacity in a modular fashion as demand requires--and in this way minimize target risk. Meanwhile, smaller companies, which cannot buy their way into the game nor compete in the more mature world of fast followers, are using their technology development expertise to come up with good drugs against novel targets in diseases where no antibody treatments currently exist, hoping that the novelty of the resulting products will give them the kind of leverage they haven't been able to get from platform dealmaking.