Biomedical firms welcome open innovation, says pharma leader

Open innovation has radically changed how pharmaceutical companies do R&D, but the UK must do more to increase industry spending on research, a conference has heard.

Innovation has shifted from an environment of secrecy to one where collaborative working is welcomed, said Garry Pairaudeau, head of hit discovery at the multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. He was speaking at an event on the future of open innovation hosted by the Science2Society project in Cambridge on 13 February.

Pairaudaeu said that in the past the idea of sharing anything with an organisation outside one’s own company was foreign. “Everything we did was absolutely top secret,” he said. Now, things have dramatically changed, moving to an environment that is “incredibly open and transparent”, he said.