Dive Brief:
- Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) has announced its intention to decrease its R&D budget in favor of increasing collaborative deals with biotech companies and academic institutions. Specifically, BI plans to spend only $2.5 billion per year on research over the next five years—a 17% drop from 2014.
- BI has earmarked $1.6 billion of its five-year budget for these types of collaborative deals.
- One goal of this strategy is for BI to expand beyond its core competencies.
Dive Insight:
Although BI just announced its new five-year growth strategy, the company has been pursuing collaborative deals fairly aggressively over the last year. As a result, it has inked deals with the Icahn School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Scripps Research Institute and Weill Cornell Medicine to study new approaches to treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
In addition, BI has teamed up twice with Germany-based BioMed X, which crowd-funds research and allows researchers to pitch their ideas, with the possibility of getting funding.
According to BI's SVP, Michael Pairet, the goal is to move towards more "extensive open-innovation approaches between academia and industry in biomedical research," as reported by Fierce Biotech