In this guest blog, Kristin Jones, CEO of PULSE Partner Indiana Life Sciences Association, discusses how pro-competitive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have played a crucial role in supporting collaborations between universities, academic researchers and life sciences companies across Indiana. These partnerships are critical to fueling economic growth, supporting job creation and, most importantly, bringing new treatments to patients. Read Kristin’s blog below:
For almost a century, the state of Indiana has been a powerhouse of life sciences innovation. From tackling diseases like Alzheimer’s to cancer, innovations that began in Indiana have transformed the treatment landscape. Indiana is now the leading exporter of life sciences products in the United States, and is home to more than 70,000 life sciences jobs statewide. Pro-competitive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have been critical to Indiana’s success by facilitating dynamic partnerships among our state’s universities, academic researchers and life sciences companies of all sizes.
M&A helps facilitate the complex process of taking promising research from Indiana’s world-class universities and turning that into approved therapies for patients. Drug discovery and development is an uncertain, expensive and arduous process. Bringing a new medicine to market can take over a decade, cost billions and has a 90 percent failure rate. M&A and other collaborations allow our local innovators to partner and connect promising discoveries with the resources and capabilities needed to advance them from the lab to the clinic and, finally, to patients.
One example is the strong partnership between Purdue University and Eli Lilly & Co., which has thrived for more than a century. This partnership has served to connect Purdue’s cutting-edge scientific expertise with Eli Lilly’s established expertise in bringing medicines to patients at scale — a model that has proven highly effective. Recently, Eli Lilly announced an investment of $250 million to support Purdue’s research programs focused on accelerating drug discovery and development, including through artificial intelligence. Purdue’s partnerships with Eli Lilly and other life sciences companies have yielded 136 research publications, 125 intellectual property disclosures documenting new discoveries and 8 new drug patents.
Indiana University’s (IU) leadership in Alzheimer’s disease research offers another powerful example of the value that life sciences partnerships create for innovation — and for patients. IU’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center is one of two research institutions designated to improve and diversify the drug development pipeline for Alzheimer’s disease. In clinical research, IU has worked alongside private life sciences companies for decades, including through clinical trials that led to the only two FDA-approved disease modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
The University of Notre Dame’s Warren Center for Drug Discovery also collaborates with Eli Lilly and other life science companies across the state to investigate new approaches to treating diseases with significant unmet needs. The Warren Center has partnered with Travere Therapeutics (then Retrophin) since 2015 to discover treatments for NGLY1 deficiency — a genetic enzyme deficiency that can lead to developmental delay, movement disorders, seizures and ocular abnormalities.
In Indiana and across the country, a merger or acquisition is often an anticipated milestone in transforming discoveries borne out of these types of partnerships into approved medicines for patients. M&A enables universities and small companies to specialize in early discovery while connecting them with the infrastructure, capital, and expertise necessary to bring them to patients — creating real pathways for new medicines and new ideas to succeed in the market. These pro-competitive partnerships have played a critical role in supporting economic growth, sustaining high-quality jobs and most importantly, bringing life-changing treatments to patients. Policymakers should recognize this reality and preserve the differentiated role of M&A and other collaborations, both here in Indiana and across the United States’ life sciences industry.