The industry’s focus is on living organisms. The highly regulated standards make it a unique concern for business leaders. These features make the industry an ideal source of technological innovation, resulting in major breakthroughs which have improved the yield of agricultural crops, developed biofuels and led to life-saving pharmaceutical products.

When it comes to revenue-generating strategies biotech start-ups have numerous options. The majority choose either a technology partnership or an asset creation-and-out licensing strategy. Technology partnering generates faster revenue with lower risk of financial loss while an asset creation and out-licensing strategy generates significantly more lucrative returns if it is successful. A increasing number of index biotechs in the research phase employ an approach that blends both strategies.

If you choose to go with the approach of developing based on products will be successful commercially when they get their pipeline to the right stage and attract a large pharmaceutical partner or an investor with a large sum of money. This could be a costly proposition. It is essential to balance opportunistic approaches in leveraging outside assets and the right scientific decisions regarding the development of home-grown products.

Alternately, the “platform” model offers an alternative method of earning revenue. It is less expensive than development based on product, but is a risky option. In this model, a biotech owns and develops its platform technology prior to collaboration with big pharma firms to create a portfolio drug discovery projects that focus on specific diseases (i.e. disease that is x within biology and y). This is the approach that Advinus Therapeutics and a few others have taken.