Will mergers compensate for a broken drug discovery model? After failing to develop enough promising new medicines to make up for the billions of dollars of sales set to fall off the patent cliff, drugmakers are racing to combine with rivals, cut costs and diversify their businesses. Drug companies like to pay lip service to research when acquiring rivals, and the recent spate of mega-deals is no exception. Yet Pfizer’s $68bn acquisition of Wyeth and Merck’s $41bn bid for Schering-Plough will only affect research pipelines at the margins.