To reduce such waste, the drugmaking industry is turning increasingly to the Internet to trade intellectual property. Semiconductor and softwaremakers have traded intellectual property online for several years, but biotech has moved more slowly. Selling molecules is tricky, and companies only now are developing ways of conveying technical information about what's for sale without giving away secrets. Other intellectual property electronic exchanges are targeting the life sciences. A competitor, Newton, Mass.-based ActiveCyte, has developed its own standard to display information about intellectual property, and has begun a trial run with two pharmaceutical companies.
Some analysts are skeptical.
By its nature it's not tangible. Biotech companies and universities, which do much of early stage drug research, often try to sell their lead products and if possible their leftovers to bigger companies to bring them to market. There's just a lot of wasted energy in the matching process, just finding out who's got what, who's looking for what. For larger companies, exchanges are a way to trim waste in their licensing businesses. About 10 of those could conceivably become something useful, like a drug, DuJardin says, and the costs of those Bayer decides not to develop show up in high drug prices.