Although stakeholders are interested in value-based models that link a drug’s performance to emerging evidence of improved patient outcomes, such agreements are difficult to implement and too limited in scope to drive a shift to value-based reimbursement. The authors suggest a new, structured approach to bring these contracts into the mainstream, thus transforming product reimbursement and fueling the shift from volume to value.

The current unit-based pricing model for drugs is too one-dimensional for the market's present needs. Pharma firms must identify products that will benefit from innovative pricing models, and then forge the types of collaborations that will support those models.

Maybe no company is safe from activists, but there are protective measures that managers and boards can take. What biopharmas can learn from Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Pershing Square’s pursuit of Allergan.

Talk to any Big Pharma business development executive about deal-making trends for more than 15 minutes and the word out-licensing is bound to crop up. Major drugmakers are moving beyond the rhetoric and actually giving up rights to individual assets that heretofore would have been deemed too valuable to merit out-licensing -- but with qualifications.

Laurels go to Forma/Genentech (alliance), Sanofi/Genzyme (M&A) and Quanticel (exit/financing) in reader poll.

Three major drug makers inked broad alliances with the research departments of major US payers in 2011. The alliances signal that even as pharma reorients its R&D engines to be more flexible and externally focused in the hopes of shedding risk and cost, such moves are not enough.