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Two of the chief goals of most companies are to secure their own existence and generate above‐average returns for their owners. One of the main ways that companies attempt to achieve these goals is to grow, and pharmaceutical companies are no exception in this regard. However, whereas internal growth tends to be organic and slow, external growth can usually be achieved more quickly, for example, through mergers, acquisitions or other external transactions. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of merger and acquisition (M&A) activities on pharmaceutical company success, measured in terms of financial and other performance indicators. We identified the top 30 pharmaceutical companies worldwide by revenue in 2020 and gathered data on M&A activities and a broad range of financial and other performance indicators from 2000 to 2020. We then used a generalised difference‐in‐difference design to evaluate the extent to which a company's success was affected by substantial M&A activities versus organic growth. To do so, we defined a premerger period of 2 years and a postmerger period of 3 years. We classified M&A activities as substantial when transaction costs were greater than 20% of a company's annual revenue. Our results indicate that there is a clear trend for M&As to have a positive impact on corporate success compared with organic growth. For example, after an M&A, a company's annual revenue increased on average by 3.50 billion United States dollars (USD) (p = 0.000) in the first year and by 4.52 billion USD (p = 0.000) in the second year. For employee growth, we found significant increases across all time periods (p = 0.000). Postmerger increases were also seen in gross profit in the first (+1.65 billion USD, p = 0.053) and second (+2.61 billion USD, p = 0.005) years, as well as in net profit (+6.82 billion USD, p = 0.014) and return on assets in the first year (+12.04 percentage points, p = 0.016). However, indicators of innovation (e.g. research and development [R&D] spending) and of stakeholder value (e.g. market capitalisation) did not show a significant increase. Compared with the impact of organic growth alone, M&A activities in the pharmaceutical industry led to significantly higher market dominance, size and profits but did not have a significant impact on innovation or shareholder value over the short time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Background: IBDBIO‐ASSIST was a randomised controlled trial assessing the efficacy of care provided by IBD nurse specialists in Germany in improving health‐related quality of life (QoL) in IBD patients on biologic therapy. Aim: To evaluate patient‐related outcomes and economic consequences associated with integrating IBD nurses into usual care. Methods: We randomly assigned 1086 patients with IBD on biologic therapy to a control group (CG) receiving usual care or an intervention group (IG) receiving additional care from an IBD nurse specialist. The primary outcome was disease‐specific QoL (sIBDQ) assessed at 6, 12 and 18 months. Results: At baseline, patients in both groups were highly satisfied with their treatment situation and had relatively high sIBDQ values (range: 1–7; CG: 5.12; IG: 4.92). In the intention‐to‐treat (ITT) analysis of the overall sample, there was no significant difference in sIBDQ between groups at the assessment time points. However, a per‐protocol analysis of patients with impaired QoL at baseline (EQ‐VAS < 75 [median]), showed improvement in sIBDQ over 6 months that became significant at month 12 and remained significant through month 18 (baseline: IG 4.24; CG 4.31; 18 months: IG 5.02; CG 4.76; p = 0.017). Conclusion: High baseline satisfaction of IBD patients with treatment and the relatively high baseline sIBDQ values may have contributed to the lack of significant difference in sIBDQ scores for the overall sample. However, patients with impaired QoL derived significant benefit from additional care provided by an IBD nurse specialist, leading to meaningful improvements in sIBDQ over the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]