R&D outsourcing dominated by pharma and biotech

The survey, which looked at 449 responding companies make up a total global R&D investment of almost €30bn - a significant share of European business investment in R&D. The findings revealed that companies expected their global investments in R&D to grow by around 5 per cent p.a. for the next three years. These expectations reflect the dominance in the sample of the companies in pharmaceuticals & biotechnology and chemicals, which together accounted for almost 60 per cent of the total R&D investment of all companies in the sample. Changes in market demand for new products and services coupled with changes in technological opportunities have moulded the outsourcing landscape to include services such as chemistry, biology, screening and lead optimisation. The trend for outsourcing has become more widely accepted by companies, both large and small, needing to supplement their own internal drug discovery efforts and/or utilise technologies they can't afford to do in-house. The survey also confirmed the view that companies continue to prefer to locate R&D in their home country. Therefore, the top locations for R&D activity in Europe continue to be Germany, the United Kingdom and France. Outside the EU, the US remained by far the most attractive place for locating R&D activity, followed by China and India. The results seem to go against the current thinking, which suggests that advances in the Asian market, where drug discovery services cost only a fraction of what they do in the West could reduce the huge burden of drug discovery and development. The survey also detailed the most important factors when deciding where to locate R&D were market access, high availability of researchers, access to specialised R&D knowledge and results. Macroeconomic and political stability as well as R&D cooperation opportunities were also mentioned. The labour costs of researchers seemed to be less significant.