Smart Partnering: AstraZeneca offers tips for potential partners
Partnering is a trend that is defining the biotech industry. Agreements and alliances between companies advance programs and enable the partners to meet milestones that neither could reach alone.
AstraZeneca sees partnering as a long-term strategy to increase access to innovation outside its own laboratories. No two deals are the same, says Chris Yochim, the Director External Relations and Corporate Business Development, AstraZeneca, who works with potential partners to structure deals through customized approaches to leverage unique capabilities and assets in order to achieve common goals.
partneringNEWS sat down with Chris Yochim ahead of BioPharm America™ in Boston to gain a big pharma perspective on how a biotech can best leverage this partnering event.
Chris Yochim, AstraZeneca
partneringNEWS (pN): Speaking as an experienced dealmaker from big pharma, what is the most important thing a biotech firm can do to gain your interest at a partnering event?
Chris Yochim: Effective partnering is all about target marketing, which means having an in-depth and multi-dimensional view of your prospective partners’ needs. For the most part when biotech companies use an online web-enabled partnering system they employ an opposite approach—a mass marketing approach to partnering.
Consequently, AstraZeneca essentially receives a meeting request from each attending company at an event and often times these requests have in the subject line “meeting request”! That means my team and I need to return hundreds of messages asking each company ‘What therapeutic area are you in?’ or else ‘What target are you after?’
pN: What is the smart way to approach Astrazeneca ?
Chris Yochim: Our company is always open to exploring new opportunities. But, we generally do not take any courtesy meetings. Companies are wasting their time if they are not addressing their partnering project to one of our specifically stated needs that we clearly outline in our profile on the partnering system.
Sending us a message that does not specifically address one our therapeutic areas of interest ends up being an opportunity lost for that company. At any formal partnering conference, AstraZeneca might have half a dozen or more licensing directors in attendance, so if we do have a meeting that ends up being completely outside our focus, it is not that big a deal for us. But for most biotech companies who have a BD team of one or two people, a meeting that is a waste of time is a big deal, and may come at the expense of securing a meeting with a company that is a better fit for their needs. As strange as it may sound, by not taking meeting, we may actually be doing a company a favor—allowing them to focus on companies whose interests are better aligned with their partnering opportunity.
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