From Bruce Booth’s blog, three charts that illustrate the extent to which large pharma companies dwarf small biotechs.  In total, small biotech firms only spend an estimated $6 billion a year on research and development, approximately equal to Pfizer’s annual R&D budget.

From an investor’s point of view, there is a lot of opportunity in biotech — small companies have a lot of room for growth on the way to being established companies!  But for the biopharmaceutical industry as a whole  — which is suffering from a lack of in-house productivity — large scale in-licensing from biotech does not look like it can provide more than a small fraction of what pharmaceutical firms need to fill their pipelines.