Both of these scenarios have been playing out in the news recently. As reported in Bloomberg News, Teva Pharmaceuticals hired former Bristol Myers Squibb powerhouse Jeremy Levin as their new CEO, and with his hiring has come a slew of changes to Teva’s early stage deal strategy. Levin, previously known for his “string of pearls” strategy at BMS, is continuing a similar tack as the Chief Executive at Teva, saying that the pharmaceutical giant’s multi-billion dollar deals of the past decade are no longer a part of the company’s future strategy. On the other end of the spectrum, Sanofi recently announced a blockbuster discovery deal with Selecta. In this deal, Sanofi gained exclusive rights to what could prove to be a game-changing discovery platform if the drugs developed in Selecta’s immunotherapy platform deliver on their promise.

While Teva’s and Sanofi’s respective strategies seem, at first glance, as though they couldn’t be more different, there is one very important thing that they have in common: they both underscore a focus on early-stage assets. This is no easy feat, since there’s often less information available on early-stage assets, and the information that is available has traditionally been decentralized and not easily accessible. The challenge is steep, as we’ve graphed here:

Companies with an eye towards early-stage licensing and platform deals need a robust set of scientific, medical and business data to justify their decisions. As we previously stated, though, such datasets are often few and far between. If only there was an asset valuation and trend analytics platform that could help companies aggregate all available data and visualize it in real-time…

Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ ($VRX) planned $345 million acquisition of Johnson & Johnson’s ($JNJ) Ortho Dermatologics could be another positive sign for biotech companies, as Big Pharma outfits shed their auxiliary businesses to enhance focus on novel drugs.

Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a J&J unit, and French drug giant Sanofi ($SNY) have both opted to sell dermatology product businesses to specialty Canadian pharma Valeant this week. And at least in Sanofi’s case, the Big Pharma wants to pump the proceeds of its $425 million sale of its Dermik skincare group into its core pharmaceutical business. For biotech firms, that could be good news as Sanofi, J&J and other huge drugmakers form partnerships with outside developers with novel science.

As we’ve noted before, J&J is one of the perennial standouts on the biotech deal front. The company is realizing the payoff of its investments in deals such as its partnership with Vertex Pharmaceuticals ($VRTX), which gave the company European rights to newly approved hepatitis C drug telaprevir (Incivek), and its $1 billion buyout of Cougar Biotechnology, which brought J&J its recently approved prostate cancer drug abiraterone (Zytiga). And further external deals are in the offing, J&J executives have said.

In the meantime, small developers could also benefit from opportunities to gain rights to drug programs that Big Pharma outfits decide to discontinue internally. One of the great historic examples of this would be how Cubist Pharmaceuticals ($CBST) grabbed rights on the cheap to the antibiotic Cubicin from Ely Lilly ($LLY) back in the 1990s and developed the asset into the top-selling product it is today.

Read more at www.fiercebiotech.com

Big names in life sciences are backing DVS Sciences in a $14.6 million Series A round. With biomarker analysis technology for personalized medicine, the start-up has garnered investments from the investment vehicles of drug giants Pfizer ($PFE) and Roche as well as the venture firms 5AM Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. 5AM led the round.

DVS plans to use its cash infusion to commercialize its system that is similar in concept to a flow cytometer and can identify up to 100 biomarkers at a time. The system, which was developed with seed money from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, will be used for scientific research as well as clinical trials in which researchers aim to match patients with appropriate drugs based on biomarker analyses. Cancer drug development is expected to be a key area for the system. The company has its corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA, and its manufacturing and research operations in Canada.

“This financing is the first step in our transformation from a research-based entity to a commercial company,” Scott Tanner, DVS Sciences’ president, said. “We are now in a position to commercialize our innovative instrumentation and reagents that will foster the acceleration of medical research, enable personalized therapeutic diagnosis and prognosis, and transform drug discovery.”

Life sciences investors have had some success investing in flow cytometer technology as of late, with scientific tools giant Becton Dickinson’s ($BDX) buyout of venture-backed Accuri Cytometers in Ann Arbor, MI, earlier this year. Given the potential applications of DVS Systems’ technology in personalized medicine, perhaps it’s no surprise to see Pfizer and Roche–two Big Pharma players with huge stakes in this field–making bets on the company through their respective investment arms.

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Third Rock Ventures is taking $26 million out of its latest fund to bankroll another upstart biotech. In joint announcements rolled out bright and early today the venture group took the wraps off of Lotus Tissue Repair and announced an in-licensing deal for protein replacement technology that will initially target an ultra-rare disease: dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, or DEB, which causes skin blisters, morbidity and early mortality. Their recombinant collagen Type VII research also has broader applications for chronic wound healing and bone repair indications.

The Series A fits comfortably into Third Rock’s plan to occasionally go it alone in starting up biotech companies with promising new technologies. In this case, Mark de Souza fills the role of founding CEO of the developer, which will be based in Cambridge, MA. De Souza was the business development chief at Dyax, which developed Kalbitor for hereditary angioedema, an orphan genetic disease.

There are two forms of the disease, explains the CEO, each of which occur in only about one in a million people. The recessive form, he adds, is particularly lethal.

For now, Lotus Tissue will remain a virtual company, says De Souza, with a few staffers working with consultants and the scientific founders on determining the right route of administration and the manufacturing that will be needed to support clinical trials. The scientific founders–Mei Chen and David Woodley, two USC investigators working in dermatology–also recently landed $3 million in NIH funding to back a Phase I/II study, which should also help illuminate the best clinical path for Tissue Repair.

Read more at www.fiercebiotech.com

The veteran crew of cancer drug developers at MGI Pharma who went on to found Tesaro a little more than a year ago have rounded up a whopping $101 million B round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The cash gives the Boston-based biotech more cash to follow up on its late-stage plans for a lead drug program as well as a sizeable fund for new deals.

“This new capital will fully fund the development of rolapitant through Phase III clinical trials and potential regulatory submissions, and advance the ALK inhibitor program into a clinical trial assessing safety and activity in cancer patients,” says CEO Lonnie Moulder. “It will also allow us to continue to leverage the experience and competencies of our team to acquire and develop promising drug candidates with the goal of commercializing meaningful products for the treatment and support of cancer patients.”

The executive crew that founded Tesaro and quickly scooped up a $20 million Series A last spring were behind the $3.9 billion sale of MGI Pharma to Eisai back in 2008. This new round included founding investor New Enterprise Associates and a lineup of new investors: InterWest Partners, T. Rowe Price, Pappas Ventures, Oracle Partners, Deerfield Management and Leerink Swann.

Rolapitant is described as a “Phase III-ready” neurokinin-1 receptor antagonist being developed for the prevention of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. Back in March of this year Tesaro announced that it had in-licensed small molecule inhibitors of Anaplastic Lymphoma Kinase (ALK) from Amgen. The ALK program represents a molecularly targeted approach to treating certain cancer sub-populations.

Read more at www.fiercebiotech.com

It’s not been an easy time for venture groups trying to make money in the biotech arena, says Terry McGuire, the co-founder of Polaris Venture Partners. The bleak prospects for IPOs have cast a pall over the VC companies, McGuire tells CNBC. And then there’s the growing amount of time it takes to develop a new drug.

“It’s been a tough decade to be a venture cap,” says McGuire. But he still expects steady growth in the biotech sphere. And there are some distinct positives to consider.

“From a liquidity perspective what we found is that M&A [mergers and acquisitions] sales to those companies is as good as it’s ever been,” he notes. “There’s been some remarkable transactions.” And then the VCs have also been able to count on growing support from some of the pharma companies.

Says McGuire: “What happened is we have partners coming along, the major pharmaceuticals that are coming into these companies earlier than they did before becoming our partners, helping us develop those programs.”

Over the past 15 years Polaris has developed some of the best contacts in the biotech industry. Their hallmark rounds include a list of notable thinkers in the biotech world. And Polaris has shown a willingness to come in early to back interesting ideas. Polaris roster of close contacts includes Robert Langer, David Edwards, Ram Sasisekharan, Tillman Gerngross, Charles Hutchinson, Omid Farokhzad, Paul Schimmel and Phil Sharp.

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Roche says that it will work with the University of Geneva, Geneva University Hospitals and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in the translational research arena–just the latest example of a big pharma company that has been searching the globe for some expert help developing new drugs and diagnostics. And certainly not the last.

Like Sanofi and other big outfits, Roche has been reaching out more and more to academics to glean new insights on how they can do their work better. For these companies, the academic tie-ups are a strategic approach to changing the way they have tried–and often failed–at their own in-house efforts. And as Institutional Investor notes in their in-depth feature on the subject, the future of these companies will now rely heavily upon the success or failure of these new pharma/academia collaborations.

“For the last 20 years, [Big Pharma] built huge infrastructures and had huge wins on the short term,” adds Ian Wilcox, head of life sciences at Hay Group. “Now that business model requires an investor risk that is becoming untenable.”

“It’s not a productivity crisis for the industry,” Kenneth Kaitin, director of Tufts University’s Center for the Study of Drug Development, tells Institutional Investor. “It’s a business-model crisis.”

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Richard Barker has just stepped down from the top spot in the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry with some decided opinions about the changing face of the R&D side of the business. He underscores the major shift away from research silos toward an “innovation ecosystem,” in which pharma companies stop relying only on their in-house development empires as they move to a brave new world that mixes the corporate crowd with academic groups as well as small and medium-sized biotechs.

“We’re moving progressively from a model where most of the large companies did most of their research and development internally to an innovation ecosystem model,” he tells The Telegraph. “So it becomes increasingly important for the large companies to work closely with universities, research charities and small and medium-sized enterprises in the discovery adventure.”

Signs of this new ecosystem are abundant, from the ongoing stream of partnerships and buyouts of promising development programs to a flurry of pacts linking biopharma with universities like Harvard, Yale and UC San Francisco. And the failure of big M&A deals to deliver on the innovation front, Baker adds, is helping to drive this trend.

“Mergers solve some problems, but not others. For example, they can make better use of commercial infrastructure. What it doesn’t do is improve research and development productivity. What improves productivity is some of the new approaches, an ability or willingness to redesign the development process.”

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Novartis is scouting around for bolt-on deals. CEO Joe Jimenez (photo) says the Swiss company would spend up to $3 billion on consumer health and veterinary medicine acquisitions to beef up its businesses in those areas, Bloomberg reports. Novartis would also snap up assets in generics, biotech or diagnostics.

“We do expect to make bolt-on acquisitions to these five platforms, and we could do that today,” Jimenez told the news service. “And when I say bolt-on, I mean anything from $1 billion to $3 billion.”

Like its Big Pharma rivals, Novartis is shopping for buys to help offset the impending loss of patent protection on some big-selling drugs–in this case, the blood pressure drug Diovan and the cancer remedy Gleevec. It has been working to diversify its stable of businesses, expanding into eye care with its purchase of Alcon, and building up in generics, consumer health and emerging markets.

As Bloomberg notes, Novartis recently hired Johnson & Johnson veteran Naomi Kelman to bolster its over-the-counter drugs business, which ranks seventh in the field with an estimated $3 billion in sales. Jimenez says he’d look “very hard” at any consumer brands that become available. Sandoz, its generics unit, would do well to snap up generics of difficult-to-make meds, such as injectable cancer treatments, he says.

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Medco CEO David Snow keeps close tabs on the blockbuster drugs which are about to face generic competition. And the PBM chief has also done the math on biotech drugs, which will steadily swell from today’s 17 percent of total drug spending to 50 percent in 2020–just nine years. Put those two trends together and you have a potent fuel firing up an interest in biotech M&A that will leave every big player–from Human Genome Sciences to Amgen–and a host of small ones in line for a potential Big Pharma buyout offer.

“Large brand manufacturers are going to be acquisitive when it comes to biotech companies. You’re going to find all the big manufacturers are going to have deep capability in biotech,” Snow said at the Reuters Health Summit. “Literally it’s possible for any biotech manufacturer that’s a pure play today” to be a takeover target at the moment. You have to become awfully large to be unaffordable–there’s lots of cash, lots of capital out there for acquisitions.

Back in January at the JP Morgan confab a number of deal-makers in the business confidently predicted that we would see a significant wave of buyout deals in the first half of the year, with the possibility that the spike in M&A activity would spill into the second half as well. That wasn’t wishful thinking. Aside from the Genzyme buyout the biotech industry has seen a large number of takeovers, driven at least in part by the absence of a viable IPO option and pharma’s interest in snagging important new products for its pipeline while they are still sitting on a large pile of blockbuster revenue.

Read more at www.fiercebiotech.com