R&D Vision and Strategy

With many countries now grappling with the issue of a declining birthrate and aging population, the need to balance innovation with sustainable social security has become a fundamental global issue, to the extent of being taken up by the United Nations. The public is starting to push back against the argument that high prices are warranted by the innovative nature of new drugs. In our medium-term business plan, Shionogi Growth Strategy 2020 (SGS2020), we outline a vision of “to grow sustainably as a drug discovery-based pharmaceutical company contributing to a more vigorous society through improved healthcare,” and on that premise we remain committed to supplying drugs that combine efficacy with a reasonable price.

In order to facilitate a focus on creating new drugs balancing innovation with affordable healthcare, we have maintained small molecule drug discovery as a key strength while also building on this platform to further strengthen our drug discovery capabilities by expanding into a new modality—that of medium molecule drugs including peptide-based therapies. In addition to being comparatively inexpensive in the manner of small molecule drugs, peptides rival antibody therapeutics in their target specificity (ensuring high potency with relatively few off-target side effects), while also having a molecular property profile enabling access to intracellular targets, which antibody therapeutics can struggle to reach.

Among pharmaceutical companies, some have scanty pipelines and therefore choose to supply patients with drugs licensed in from other companies. At Shionogi, though, we take a different approach. We believe that our job—and indeed our raison d’etre—is to be of use to patients by supplying them with products discovered in our pharmaceutical research and progressed right through to the stage of regulatory approval. We accordingly are focused squarely on in-house drug discovery. Over the past 14 years, we have succeeded in bringing seven proprietary drugs to market. Whereas the original pipeline ratio at most pharmaceutical companies is said to be 20–30%, we aspire to a ratio of about 50–70%, and as at the end of March 2021, our original pipeline ratio was 71%. We take pride in this high ratio as we think it is indicative of our strength in in-house drug discovery.