Professor Earns Best Industry Studies Paper Honour
Moren Lévesque, Schulich Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems (OMIS) and CPA Ontario Chair in International Entrepreneurship, and her colleagues have been chosen as the second-place winners of the prestigious 2021 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award.
Presented by the Industry Studies Association for excellence in industry studies research, the award hopes to encourage a cultural shift by scholars toward explicit recognition of their engagement with industry practitioners and demonstrate the benefits of such interaction for scholarly research.
The study, published in Production and Operations Management shows that scientific teams in biopharma companies might be allocating too much time to early-stage drug discovery projects that are doomed to fail. “A central feature of drug discovery projects is whether the drug is more of a follower- type or first of its kind,” says co-author Professor Lévesque.
By nature, first-in-class drugs face significantly more risk during their development since they have no predecessors to learn from. “Whether a drug is a follower or first-in-class is not a binary measure, but more like a continuum because it is captured by the number of competitors that engage in the discovery of similar drugs,” remarked Lévesque. “To balance risk and return, biopharmas should favour delaying pulling the plug on those projects in the middle of this continuum.”