Professor William S. Comanor speaks on mergers and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry

While industry leaders explain their mergers as a response to these shocks and a partial solution to the declining productivity problem, the lecture advanced the reverse hypothesis: that instead of enhancing R&D productivity, the merger wave has jeopardized it. The speaker emphasized the uncertainties inevitably encountered in new drug discovery and development and the role of "parallel paths", i.e. the pursuit of multiple approaches to solving any given medical problem, in coping with those uncertainties. Visit the event website for more information.