The impact of inter-organizational collaborations on the development of antibody and protein therapeutics

The declining R&D-productivity in the pharmaceutical industry urges all stakeholders to streamline their R&D efforts. Leading contributions argue that inter-organizational collaborations during drug development might solve this conundrum. However, empirical contributions on drug development success rates often remain descriptive and lack the formulation and testing of formal hypotheses regarding the factors influencing clinical trial success. We use a multilevel binomial logistic regression to investigate our research question: Does inter-organizational collaboration during the clinical development of biologic therapeutics influence clinical trial success? We control for the most cited variables influencing trial success. We find a significant negative impact of collaborations including a not-for-profit research institute. Furthermore, we find no significant impact of collaborations including an industrial partner, neither of the control variables. These results show that the advantages of collaborative drug development are hard to obtain and that a different approach, focusing less on portfolio management, is needed.