These days, one can almost be convinced of the reality of a truly efficient market, one that brings together buyers and sellers, matching excess capacity with need. The Internet promises to make this possible, by acting as the ultimate go-between. It is not only the purveyors of products that have realized the potential of the Internet's connectivity. Recently, several sites have gone up to facilitate the buying and selling of certain fungible but less tangible assets of R&D based companies. Yet2.com, Pharmalicensing.com,and PL-X.com all have web sites that seek to match buyers and sellers in technology transfer. PharmaUniverse.com hopes to create an efficient market for other pharmaceuticals assets like short-dated inventory or manufacturing capacity.
The Web, as E-Bay has definitively shown, can create relatively efficient markets, bringing together diverse buyers and sellers. Health care has seen a number of marketing and distribution plays, like Ventro Corp. , Neoforma.com Inc. , and MedAssets.com Inc.
Now companies are starting up to broker the often less obvious assets of the industry. The founders of drug delivery start-up Zentrx Inc.have now founded PharmaUniverse.com to smooth out the...