We were just preparing a blog on the role of platforms in supporting Life Science R&D and the growing trend for Pharma and Biotech to wish to have an informatics and data platform to underpin their R&D. But putting that on hold for a week in just seeing the news of the acquisition of Dotmatics by Insightful science made us reflect on how busy the last 2 years have been with consolidation and acquisition in the R&D Informatics space.
The recent increased merger and acquisition activity is aligned to the wider focus on R&D and health and especially in the last 12 months with the role that science has had in Covid-19 Vaccines and testing.
Biotechs and Pharma have always had M&A activity but the role of informatics software and services to manage this scientific data is now getting the extra attention its value and potential deserves.
The challenge of creating, governing, managing and analysing data for scientific insights remains critical for R&D Life Science success. Aligned to the fact that the promise and value of AI & ML will only be secured if the data used to build the models has sufficient quality and quantity.
The fast pace of R&D is both felt in the biotech sector and also in the R&D Informatics data and software environments. Some recent M&A activities:
- Insightful Science acquiring Dotmatics
- Both of whom have acquired organisations over the last 2 years
- Dotmatics acquired BioBright
- Insightful Science have a stable of products (PRISM, SnapGene etc)
- Both of whom have acquired organisations over the last 2 years
- Biovia, in being part of Dassault have acquired Medidata
- Instem acquiring the Edge Consultancy
- Certara have a stable of products
- Elsevier acquiring Scibite
- Danaher expanding with GE & IDBS
- Others we have missed please mention in the comments below
In the short term what can we expect?
More acquisitions and mergers of this type given the pace of R&D, number of startups and the investment environment.
And in the mid term?
The role and value of data to support R&D remains critical and initiatives such as FAIR, data governance and quality will need to be accelerated with the appropriate informatics tools plus the appropriate business change to support the technology, digital and data initiatives.
We will continue our blog series on data, governance FAIR and the role these platforms can have in driving R&D decision making. A previous post on platforms and their role in R&D