Acquisition of drug candidates in new drug development in Japan

Open innovation (OI) is becoming a popular R&D management strategy in pharmaceuticals. In this study, we performed a comprehensive data collection on drug candidate acquisition, that has been the major OI mode during the drug development phase, in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry for the past 30 years. Our empirical analysis revealed that the acquisition of drug candidates has been widely conducted (accounting for a quarter of all newly developed compounds), and has contributed to more than half of launched products. Surprisingly, the acquisition of drug candidates has remained flat for the past 20 years; it has not increased in recent years despite the advocacy of OI. Acquisition at the preclinical stage was prevalent in the 1980s, and then late-stage acquisition started to increase and has dominated in recent years. There was no significant difference in therapeutic area distribution between in-house and outside-origin projects, suggesting that drug candidate acquisition was utilized mainly to reinforce internal R&D. Our findings can serve as a basis for discussion on the future direction of drug candidate acquisition in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry.