Here’s a look at drug approvals (both small molecules and biologics) from the 20 largest drug companies during 2015-2021, looking for trends in where these things have been coming from. It’s important to realize that this is a zoomed-in view right from the start, because there were 323 FDA approvals during this period, 138 of which came from those twenty companies. So while there’s definitely a tilt towards those big players in total approvals, the drug industry (as has long been the case) has a lot of players involved. I sat down and counted the number of companies that had solo approvals during that time and came up with 165 total, including several that I’d frankly never heard of. So the top 20 are only about 12% of the companies on the list, although they’re a heck of a lot more if you total up revenues!
But a key number is that 90 of those 138 approvals (65%) came from somewhere else than the company that filed them - some (40% of the 90) were from acquisitions of smaller companies, while others were from collaborations and in-licensing. And since I always get asked about this, only 7% of the total approved drugs from the top 20 companies had academic origins. I don't know what that figure would be like if you looked at all 323 approvals; presumably it's a bit higher. Here’s a chart with all the information for the 138, which is in the Supplementary Information of the paper and should be free to access.
At the same time, most all of those 20 companies had at least some approvals from their own efforts - with the exceptions (in order of size) of J&J, Sanofi, Takeda, Astellas, and Biogen, none of whom had any approvals from internally-generated projects during that six-year period. J&J had six in-licensed-drug approvals and two acquisition-drug approvals; Sanofi had four and three, respectively; Takeda had six acquisition drug approvals; Astellas had one collaboration, one in-licensing, and one acquisition approval, and Biogen had three in-licensing approvals. Those last two were nearly at the bottom of the entire list for total approvals among the top 20, but Boehinger Ingleheim had only one (albeit from their own work).
So it’s safe to say - and it’s been safe to say for quite a while now - that the business model of the big drug companies is to come up with what they can on their own, but to rely on outside compounds for the majority of their new approvals. I’ve written several times about why I think no large company has taken the ultimate step of ditching their own R&D and relying solely on external candidates (you can be sure that the thought has crossed peoples’ minds over the years), but it’s absolutely true that no large company, not for a long time, has ever tried to rely just on their own discoveries, either.