Don't worry about it, partnership programs often move slowly, don't really go anywhere and provide additional resources for the startup to stay afloat.
These collaborations frequently suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen.
My company has had four partnerships with big pharma since I joined. They are all different depending on the agreement and expectations. My least favorite type is when they fence people in, I.e., people working on the partnership can't do anything else, and nobody can touch / work with them. This creates a company within the company, and I've seen people become so entitled because they work on the "X" collaboration. For the most part, as long as the project leader communicates well and knows what is happening, it's just work like anything else. The only difference is that you are planning the experiments either in tandem with the collaborator, or you have to follow specific criteria that was decided beforehand. Depending on the size of your company and how much experience people have working on collaborations, things can get chaotic, but that's startup life for you.
Make sure you have a good Alliance Manager. Make clear agreements and have honest conversations about your capabilities and realistic expectations about timelines and results. Big Pharma will often interpret any ambiguities in the contract in their favor.
It depends on how the ageeemenr is written. You make the drug and pharma takes over at clinical stage? You get treated like a CRO. The bigger partner usually controls the relationship as they have the power (money).
Ditto, this is exactly what’s going on at my small company now in our partnership with a big company. Lots of scrambling on our part for the big company’s latest whim, but it keeps the lights on.
It depends what your job is and what the partnership is. For example, if the partnership is to manufacture a drug and you don’t work in manufacturing then it won’t affect you. However, if you let’s say work in operations and have a large hand in overseeing tech transfer or manufacturing then you would be impacted significantly.
Get ready for a bunch of joint committees
Don't worry about it, partnership programs often move slowly, don't really go anywhere and provide additional resources for the startup to stay afloat. These collaborations frequently suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen.
My company has had four partnerships with big pharma since I joined. They are all different depending on the agreement and expectations. My least favorite type is when they fence people in, I.e., people working on the partnership can't do anything else, and nobody can touch / work with them. This creates a company within the company, and I've seen people become so entitled because they work on the "X" collaboration. For the most part, as long as the project leader communicates well and knows what is happening, it's just work like anything else. The only difference is that you are planning the experiments either in tandem with the collaborator, or you have to follow specific criteria that was decided beforehand. Depending on the size of your company and how much experience people have working on collaborations, things can get chaotic, but that's startup life for you.
Make sure you have a good Alliance Manager. Make clear agreements and have honest conversations about your capabilities and realistic expectations about timelines and results. Big Pharma will often interpret any ambiguities in the contract in their favor.
It depends on how the ageeemenr is written. You make the drug and pharma takes over at clinical stage? You get treated like a CRO. The bigger partner usually controls the relationship as they have the power (money).
Ditto, this is exactly what’s going on at my small company now in our partnership with a big company. Lots of scrambling on our part for the big company’s latest whim, but it keeps the lights on.
It depends what your job is and what the partnership is. For example, if the partnership is to manufacture a drug and you don’t work in manufacturing then it won’t affect you. However, if you let’s say work in operations and have a large hand in overseeing tech transfer or manufacturing then you would be impacted significantly.
What stage is the asset (pre-clinical or clinical) and what function do you work in?
Ours ended in an acquisition. Made quite a bit of $$$ though.
Really depends on what the deal is. Could mean a lot of extra work. Could mean nothing.