Few people in biotech have the guts to stir the pot the way Kevin Kinsella did in an interview with Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow earlier this month.
Kinsella, a venture capitalist with a 30-year track record of biotech investing, delivered a blistering analysis of what he sees as the pharmaceutical industry’s bad-faith negotiating habits, predatory behavior, and short-term, brass knuckle business tactics when dealing with smaller biotech firms. Big Pharma, basically, risks killing the golden goose of biotech innovation it needs to survive, he contends.
Big Pharma, of course, is branded as the bad guy every day of the week. It gets attacked for gouging Grandmas on fixed incomes with excessive drug prices. It takes heat for paying “key opinion leader” physicians who then influence peers to prescribe expensive brand-name drugs. It gets ripped for donating to Congressmen who then protect the industry’s profits through legislation like the new healthcare reform law, or the Medicare drug benefit.
But Kinsella’s charge is different: This comes from an insider within the biomedical/financial complex—someone who would normally be considered an ally of Big Pharma. Biotech and Big Pharma, after all, are supposed to have a symbiotic relationship. Big Pharma has money, manufacturing, and marketing horsepower, but needs a steady supply of innovative new drugs to keep the machine moving forward. Biotech has inventive people with ideas to create new drugs, and the entrepreneurial spirit to navigate the risky early days of R&D, but it often lacks the money and manpower to take a new drug all the way to the marketplace. At some point, the Big Pharma operation strikes a deal to scoop up the little biotech and its drugs to replenish the pipeline, rewarding the shareholders and employees of the biotech company.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work, anyway, but not in the dysfunctional situation Kinsella describes.
Big Pharma companies of today, which are still raking in profits by the billions, sense they have the upper hand in the wake of the Lehman Brothers/Merrill Lynch/Fannie/Freddie-driven financial crisis of 2008. Economists might say the recession is over, but the financial crisis still has a huge impact on early-stage biotech companies today.
Here’s why: Many venture capital firms are slowly, quietly dying off. By and large, they haven’t been able to produce lucrative returns, via IPOs or acquisitions, in the past few years. That means they don’t have the leverage to raise new funds from the pensions, endowments, and other institutions that only consider venture capital as one of many asset classes—a way to get a little better return than, say, a T-bill. Since VCs are struggling to justify their existence, many of the biotech companies that rely on venture capital are also slowly, quietly, running out of the cash they need to sustain this enterprise. Many biotech companies—especially the ones with minimal evidence to suggest their drug works in people—have no choice but to genuflect at the feet of Big Pharma.
So Big Pharma—which has been consolidating through mega-mergers into what amounts to an oligopoly—has sized up a situation it can exploit, Kinsella says. It has been offering up stingy terms to biotech companies that provide practically zero return to the people who shouldered all the risk from the biotech company’s early days. This kind of hardball negotiating has potential to push the whole biotech industry to the brink of extinction, Kinsella argues. After a while, it becomes like commercial overfishing, he says.
The story has been generating chatter all over the web for more than a week. Derek Lowe, the author of the terrific blog “In the Pipeline,” generated a lot of commentary with his own post on Kinsella’s charges. Last I checked, The Atlantic‘s take on this had 154 comments.
Kinsella ran the risk of burning some bridges in pharmaland, or otherwise ticking off lots of people with this kind of commentary. He tells me he was warned
