Industry Series: Transfer Pricing for Life Sciences

Like life itself, the life sciences industry is expansive and constantly evolving, which is why keeping up with the cutting edge of developments and understanding the dynamic implications is crucial to practicing transfer pricing in this industry. Often times, the ever-changing regulatory landscape, from both tax and scientific perspectives, present unique challenges to this industry. For instance, how to define intellectual property in this industry is not always straightforward… should it be limited to formulas, or have there been breakthroughs in the development of novel manufacturing processes that should be protected? Also, how does a company appropriately divide the profits amongst the entities involved in often a decades long development cycle? That is a particularly onerous task – but one that must be addressed by, you guessed it, transfer pricing.

The answers to these questions all have implications on taxable outcomes, and transfer pricing is central to this analysis. While we focus on the pharmaceutical sector in this episode, you will come to appreciate how much more there is to learn about this industry and the various sub-sectors.

As part of our Industry Series, Exploring Transfer Pricing tours different industries with specialists to discuss some of what makes their industry of focus unique, and how that might impact the transfer pricing.

Our host Brittany Hardin Tanguay welcomes Molly Minnear (Principal and Senior Industry Lead for Life Sciences) and Rui Che (Managing Director, Tax - Economic and Valuation Services) both based out of Philadelphia, to introduce the life sciences (pharmaceutical) industry in the context of transfer pricing.