In 2009, Amyris Biotechnologies was building a plant in Brazil that used synthetic biology to convert sugarcane into both renewable fuels and renewable chemicals. The Amyris' marketing team was investigating the commercial interest for both types of products, while the research and development...

This paper examines the relative performance of vertically integrated projects versus collaborative projects in the bio-pharmaceuticals industry. Using Akerlof's (1970) model of the impact of asymetric information on quality, this paper suggests that a potential "lemons" problem exists in the...

In the biotech world, the 18-year-old Munich-based company MorphoSys was a rarity: it was profitable. The company achieved this profitability not by developing and selling its own drugs, but by licensing access to its proprietary library of human antibodies. Recently, the company decided to...