Proving The Value Of Strategic Partnerships - What Strong Relationships Can Accomplish

By Gareth Temple and Stuart Dean

Let’s be clear about something right up front. This is not a story about the benefits of outsourcing laboratory services. Rather, this is an entirely different approach to lab research, development, and management services called co-sourcing, where on-site providers – often represented by a company’s own former employees – work hand-in-hand with staff scientists to maintain and oversee multi-vendor instrumentation and related services.

Why is this important? Just ask Brussels-based UCB (Union Chimique Belge). As a global leader in the biopharmaceutical sector, the company specializes in the research, development, and treatment of severe diseases affecting the central nervous and respiratory systems, immunology and inflammatory disorders, and oncology.

Since its founding in 1928, the Belgian firm has built a global reputation on a simple guiding principle: the complexities of severe diseases require the expertise and resources of many organizations working together toward a common goal. Adherence to that principle has led the company to become widely recognized as an industry champion of strategic partnerships. These partnerships include a broad network of leading academics, industries, commercial collaborators, and suppliers who provide complementary skills and expertise that allow the company to play to its own strengths in delivering effective treatments that transform the lives of people living with severe diseases. The value the pharma company places on these strategic agreements— whether it be for drug research or marketing advice to lab and contract services—runs to the very core of the company’s founding philosophy.

This Article is published with permission from the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), and Pharmaceutical Engineering Magazine