Sosei's Drug Re-Profiling Strategy: A Three-Way Street

By going after Big Pharma's late-stage cast-offs, biotechs that want to be drug developers can lop years off the development time compared to de novo pharmaceutical discovery. The in-licensed compounds have already met, at the least, the druggability hurdle; their intellectual property is nailed down, they've passed the ADMET tests, and they're scalable. This strategy promises to maximize the assets of large company drug originators and give to younger, smaller companies access to compounds for in-licensing. However, the companies that could benefit the most from such an in-licensing strategy, the platform biotechs, often don't. The companies need compounds to move from platforms to product models, but pharma just doesn't see what these partners, based around a single technology and without a presence in the marketplace, can do for them. Now Japan's Sosei Co. Ltd. has come up with a new drug re-profiling strategy that makes licensing a three-way street; for itself, for platform biotechs and for pharmaceutical firms.