The new data I was reading was from IQVIA. The company’s most recent report does a grand job, as always, of making the complexity of global pharma R&D trends as simple as possible but no simpler. I especially admire the way IQVIA pulls out the key trends and helps us see the wood for the trees. This report, for example, identified the continuing growth in orphan drug registrations, big inflows of venture capital and the increasing trend for smaller biopharma companies to bring their own products to market rather than license to a major player. The report lists several other trends too but even in my fantasy seminars I have to focus my content on three key points. So those were the ones I talked about as Darwin sat in my audience, stroking his beard.

I imagined describing how R&D investment is driven by risk-adjusted return on investment so it was interesting to note that close to half the new drugs being approved were orphan drugs, a seeming paradox because these drugs have tiny markets. At this point Darwin, who once famously predicted a species of moth by looking at an orchid, raised his hand to ask some questions. Were there any advantages to being an orphan drug? Yes, tax advantages for one. Did they have competition? Not so much, as they get extended regulatory exclusivity. Could they compete outside their niche? Funny you should ask; some orphan drugs now sell large volumes by extending their indications. And so in my head I realised that Darwin was doing what good academics do. He was helping me answer my own question. If a species of business model seems to thrive, it must indicate selection pressures in its favour and that’s clearly what has happened with orphan drugs.

OK, so perhaps that was an easy one for the father of modern biological thinking. What about the flow on venture capital that seems to have transformed early drug development? What happened to good old-fashioned vertically integrated pharmaceutical research? In my fantasy seminar, I’m pretty sure Darwin has scribbled ‘invasive species??’ in his famous notebook before asking me some more guiding questions. Has there been a change in the environment to cause the old species to limit its range? Well, yes. The financialisation of the pharma industry would cause it to limit risks. Is there a niche where an invasive species might outcompete the old species? Again yes, because translational science is so undeveloped that it creates high-risk niches where VCs thrive. Is there a behaviour that would encourage the old species to focus on a narrower habitat? Mmmm. I guess that’s what modern portfolio theory is. Once again, Darwin has shown me that I already had the components of my answer.

I made one last attempt to baffle my hero. Why is it that a species, the emerging biotech, used to work in symbiosis with big pharma but increasingly goes to market on its own? In a market where scale matters, that can’t make evolutionary sense, can it? I fantasise that this question at least will causes the great man to pause before he asks some more questions. Might this new strategy bring benefits to the biotechs? Obviously, they keep a bigger share of the returns. And has anything changed that might allow them to do this when they couldn’t before? Ahhh! Lightbulb moment! As big pharma outsourced everything to become efficient, it coincidentally created partners, from lawyers to contract research organisations, for the biotechs to work with. As I look at Darwin in my fantasy, he smiles slightly. We’re both thinking about holobionts, those collections of creatures that thrive as if they were a single organism, like coral reefs. It’s not the biotechs competing, I can hear myself thinking. It’s the biotech’s holobionts. Thank you Mr Darwin, I got there eventually.

OK, so I know fantasy seminar isn’t going to displace fantasy football anytime soon but it’s a fun way to make sense of what’s happening in our industry. You should try it sometime.

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