Year: 2009-10

Company: Life Technologies

Liaison(s): Vicki Singer, Rodney Turner

Life Technologies was created through the merger of Invitrogen Corporation and Applied Biosystems Inc. in November 2008. The company provides premier products for life science researchers. Life Technologies provides reagent and consumable products for research applications under the Invitrogen brand, and systems-based solutions for DNA sequencing, genotyping, PCR, gene, and RNA analysis, under its Applied Biosystems brand. To maintain its strong presence, Life Technologies wishes to better understand the factors that are influencing the demand for its products. This Life Technologies-KGI TMP project analyzed trends in the outsourcing of preclinical drug discovery services to the Asia-Pacific region. Recently, there has been considerable restructuring of research and development in pharmaceutical organizations. Many preclinical drug discovery research activities, once conducted in-house, are now being outsourced to contract research organization in the Asia–Pacific region. Though the basic tools used for drug discovery remain the same, the users are changing. In phase one, we documented the outsourcing of specific preclinical drug discovery activities to the Asia-Pacific region. We interviewed KOLs from the top 10 pharmaceutical companies to better understand what specific activities are being outsourced, what is motivating the outsourcing, whether the outsourcing is increasing or decreasing, and to identify the decision-makers in this process. In the second phase of this project, we mapped the Asia-Pacific outsourcing activities of the pharmaceutical companies to Life Technologies products.