Running Your Pharma Company Out Of A Starbucks: Drug Discovery Moves To The Cloud

Small biotech start-ups accounted for 63% of all new prescription drug approvals in the last five years. And the way that many big drug companies are establishing their own venture capital funds to invest in small, innovative start-ups, it’s easy to argue that big pharma isn’t doing much innovation these days.

What’s going on here?

“You can literally sit at a Starbucks, design a compound, have the robots assemble that compound and go through the purification and analysis steps to validate what you’ve made,” Mark Fischer-Colbrie tells me. He’s the President and CEO of Strateos, and his company is taking all the processes, instruments, and robotics you’d find in a big pharmaceutical R&D facility and making them accessible to anybody with a laptop and a good idea.