Incorporating technical risk in compound real option models to value a pharmaceutical R&D licensing opportunity

► Explicitly incorporates technical risk in a generalized n-fold compound option model. ► Offer a closed-form solution for the valuation of a new drug development with commercial and technical risk. ► Illustrates the theoretical model with a real-life project of a major pharmaceutical multinational. The valuation of multi-staged pharmaceutical R&D can be interpreted as a chain of real options. In valuing these compound option models, a crucial problem is how to deal with the different types of risk. Previous models, such as Cassimon et al. (2004), offer a closed-form solution for the valuation of a new drug development using a generalized n-fold compound option model, but implicitly bundle both commercial and technical risk in one risk measure. We extend this model by explicitly incorporating technical risk, while still preserving the closed-form solution of the model. As such, this extended model is better suited to handle real-life valuation cases in the pharmaceutical industry. We document the theoretical model with a real-life project of a major pharmaceutical multinational.