Many Firmex clients are Life Sciences firms developing new therapeutic medicines. What amazes me about this industry is the time horizon of 15+ years to take a drug from idea to market, costing millions, even billions of dollars. There are 3000-4000 early-stage research-driven firms funded by public markets or venture-capital that take on the technology risk of trying to develop new drug pipeline.
The process to take a new drug through pre-clinical and clinical trials is extensive. Through the process, Life Sciences firms develop new chemical molecules. The structure of these molecules and their development are potentially worth astronomical amounts of money. Therefore, the exhaustive trials have to be guarded and kept highly confidential.
In the clinical development process, elements of the firm’s intellectual property (IP) are often shared with scientific consultants, investors and ethics committees from clinical trial sites or jurisdictions. Additionally, the IP is often reviewed by larger pharmaceutical firms seeking to either license, co-develop or buy the IP from the research based firms.
Since the IP is so valuable and confidential, Life Sciences firms will generally limit the distribution of documentation in a secure virtual data room – they can watermark, restrict printing and save documents as required. Since Life Sciences firms are sharing documents on a continuous basis and have substantial amounts of documentation, Life Sciences clients at Firmex have numerous secure data rooms and use more bandwidth and storage than any other industry segment.
At Firmex, we don’t charge per page or data room while most other 3rd party virtual data room services do. We are often chosen by Life Sciences firms because of the unlimited virtual data rooms, generous storage allowances and high security standards.
The good news is: if Life Sciences firms can save money when sharing their confidential IP, then they can devote more resources to developing cures.
