The Science and Technology Challenge: How to Find New Drugs

Due to the enormous costs of building up a pharmaceutical R&D infrastructure, it was generally believed in the late 1970s and early 1980s that no new company would ever be able to enter the pharmaceutical industry and to compete with the industry’s giants (see Robbins-Roth 2001). However, some entrepreneurs were not impressed with this challenge and created an entirely new industry — the biotechnology industry. Besides an innovative management approach as well as creative funding strategies, the main drivers for the rise of the biotechnology industry have been the emergence of new sciences and technologies. While innovation activities of established pharmaceutical companies were traditionally based on organic chemistry, biochemistry and chemical engineering, biotechnology companies have built a reputation in many novel areas, such as cell biology, molecular genetics, protein chemistry and encymology (Whittaker, Bower 1994).