Goldman in talks to fund large pharma firm: Report

Goldman Sachs Group Inc is in talks to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to a large pharmaceutical company.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc is in talks to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to a large pharmaceutical company, ‘The Financial Times’ reported.

The deal reflected the desire for even large companies with strong sales on existing drugs to seek funding for future development, Jon Symonds, managing director at Goldman in London and former finance director of AstraZeneca Plc said at the FT Pharmaceuticals Conference, the newspaper said.

A first deal — which will be with a large, unidentified drug developer other than Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca — to create a new hybrid model of research and development should be finalised early next year, Symonds said, the paper reported.

Goldman could not be immediately reached for comment.

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The possible deal will reflect a new business model that will involve creating a “research pool” into which pharma companies would place a range of experimental drugs in a single therapeutic area in early-stage phase 1 and 2 trials, where their specialists would work alongside external experts including scientists, chemists and clinical research organisations.

Symonds said the model would potentially allow competing pharma companies working on similar drugs and duplicating research areas to all pool resources in this way, the newspaper reported.