Semiconductor and software makers 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. South San Francisco, California-based Biostreet, operating since January, says it is already used by the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. A competitor, Newton-based ActiveCyte, has developed its own standard to display information about intellectual property, and was scheduled to begin a trial run this week with two pharmaceutical companies.
Some analysts are skeptical.
Such deals are now a dlrs 6 billion per year industry, Biostreet CEO Dick Haiduck says. For larger companies, exchanges are a way to reduce 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. According to UBS Warburg, dlrs 3.1 trillion worth of goods could be traded in e-marketplaces by 2005, and some analysts have predicted double that. UBS Warburg estimates that B2B sites could take in about dlrs 44 billion of that, or about 1.4 percent of the trading volume.