Hello Bluebush, abdm, Its a pleasure to return your previously extended compliments Bluebush and appreciate your post in return for its informative content.
The article very clearly illustrates the lengthiness and long winded progress between licensees and licensors partners to be ready to announce the actual agreement, a progress lined with confidentiality clauses and secrecy.
To refer to your highlighted sections from the arcticle, while I generally agree that upfront and sign up payments would be usually small, the size of the licensee should be taken into consideration, especially the extensions of financial revenue when multi billion dollar drugs are involved as abdm stated in his post.
The small upfront payment rule is further offset by the following extract from the text:
Generally, fees increase with exclusivity, the strength of patent coverage, stage of development, certainty of success, market size, geographic territory, lack of competition, and profit margin.
OBJ announcements only very recently refer to exclusivity which has me extremely interested as it referred to a new ball game with higher milestone, upfront payments involved.
For our Strategic Alliance which proposes royalty arrangements with OBJ for 5 years or until expiry of patents, it shows that we are within the usual time frame for early royalty setups:
For unpatented cell lines, including those that produce antibodies, the customary term of a royalty obligation is 510 years from market introduction or licensing.
To conclude my post, I would like to refer to the upcoming London Bio Business conference from 19th to 20th January with many global leaders attending.
"Having hosted this meeting now for ten years, we have witnessed the growing strategic importance attached towards innovation as a key competitive differentiator", commented Costas Perkas, Director at Worldwide Business Research. "With pharmaceutical businesses under more pressure to innovate than ever before, now is a critical time for biotechs and pharma players to come together and collaborate to bring new products to market".
This further supports abdm's research that we are perfectly timed within our research and testing regime conducted by several globals of our technology to ride this upcoming wave of biotech renewal.
(20min delay)