Medicines discovery in the 21st century: the case for a stakeholder corporation

It is widely accepted that biopharmaceutical companies have, in recent times, failed to deliver large numbers of new medicines to patients and have simultaneously failed to deliver large financial returns to their investors. We argue that addition of different business constructs with wider stakeholder ownership and/or control offers a way to improve returns from the great advances in medical science and drug discovery processes. Governments and other payers for medicines, the academic institutions engaged in bioscience knowledge creation, patient advocacy groups, venture philanthropists and charitable foundations can come together with commercial profit-centred businesses to develop corporate constructs that mutually benefit all of the stakeholders. A rebalancing of the social and financial motives in medicines research can arrest recent productivity decreases of the sector.