SCS Capabilities — Decision Support for In-Licensing
In-licensing is playing an increasing role in delivering drugs to the marketplace. In 2004, in-licensed drugs collectively represented more than 40 percent of the top 50 company pipelines (Source: IMS LifeCycle R&D Focus). Deals are increasing in complexity and value, placing a premium on quickly providing useful information to senior management and negotiators.
As these trends continue, a comprehensive approach for screening in-licensing candidates is needed. SCS offers a multi-level screening approach, including development of quantitative clinical utility functions that weigh multiple attributes to make explicit trade-offs between candidates. These clinical utility functions are linked to your company’s financial evaluation models to eliminate poor choices and progress good candidates — either to develop terms if the compound is a clear winner, or, to engage in more detailed modeling and simulation to estimate probability of success should the compound’s value be highly uncertain.
Information gathered is also used to benefit future evaluations. First, we record the tradeoffs encoded in utility functions and in any modeling that was performed. We also encode the key uncertainties in a Bayesian network to be updated both by information from new transactions and by the events that take place later if a compound is in-licensed.
Benefits of a transparent and rigorous in-licensing screening process include:
- Higher value of in-licensed compounds
- Stronger development portfolios
- Higher success rate for the compounds reaching the due diligence step
- More compounds screened for the same level of effort
- Improved understanding of in-license portfolio risk and associated risk mitigation strategies