Bridge Initiative: Creating Pathways to Innovation

Goal

To create a more dynamic market for biomedical innovation by leveraging novel business, research, transaction, and financing models so that more treatments can reach patients. 
 

Our First Challenge

As biopharmaceutical companies adapt their business models in response to growing competition and pricing pressures, many drug programs are suspended or not pursued at all—not because of flaws in the science but because of commercial and strategic reasons. These are potential therapies that could go on to benefit patients, but instead, go undeveloped. 

Companies can make these deprioritized drugs available for study by other entities that have the capital and development expertise to take them forward. However, there are few incentives for companies to do so; even when companies are willing to externalize their deprioritized assets, the processes for preparing assets for transfer and identifying strategic partners with the appropriate level of capital and capabilities can be resource-intensive.

Our objective is to enable more transactions for deprioritized drugs so that the promise of these assets can be fully explored.
 

Strategies

Promote culture change
Encourage biopharmaceutical companies to develop robust processes for externalizing deprioritized drug assets.

Strengthen Capacity
Help non-profit organizations identify and leverage capital sources and expertise that will enable them to progress the development of a deprioritized drug.

Create Matching Mechanisms
Facilitate the matching of deprioritized drugs to capital and development expertise.

Summaries from Working Group Meetings
Summaries from the private session 2019 Global Conference Meeting : Untying the Invisible Hand of Biomedical R& D and 2019 Future of Health Summit Meeting: Creating a Dynamic Marketplace for Biomedical Innovation.