Let the games be­gin: No­vo Nordisk takes the gold in Cowen's 'R&D pen­tathlon'

While every­one’s tuned in­to the Olympic Games in Japan, Cowen an­a­lysts put drug­mak­ers through a pen­tathlon of their own — and in terms of R&D ex­e­cu­tion over the last 10 years, Den­mark-based No­vo Nordisk $NVO took home the gold.

For the first in­au­gur­al R&D games, Cowen set up a se­ries of five chal­lenges: hur­dles, or the av­er­age time for each com­pa­ny’s agents to reach ap­proval; in­ac­tiv­i­ty, or the next stage of de­vel­op­ment; the dash, or re­cruit­ing speed; the high jump, or R&D ef­fi­cien­cy; the long jump, or de­lay du­ra­tions; and the shot put, or tri­al pushouts, de­fined by whether a de­lay du­ra­tion was pos­i­tive. The firm used da­ta col­lect­ed on 1,076 drugs from Jan. 1, 2012 to this past March.

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