Merck's strategy for striking new drug collaborations can be boiled down to a three-word mantra: faster, better and cheaper.

That was the bottom line that Margaret Beer, Merck's head of licensing and external research in Europe, offered at a recent conference. "It's not a Friday afternoon operation," Dr. Beer told colleagues at the the BioFinance and BioInnovate Europe meeting in London, according to a story in PharmaTimes. "Ninety-nine percent of the world's biomedical research takes place outside our laboratories," she told the group. And unlike some other Big Pharma companies she could mention, but didn't, Merck is keenly interested in partnering "very, very early."

The licensing chief urged developers to buttonhole Merck scientists, but only if they were working on first-in-class contenders and had solid hold of the intellectual property rights.

- here's the full report from the PharmaTimes

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