Big drug makers are ready to make a deal.

With some facing a multibillion-dollar patent cliff and others just trying to expand their focus, big biotech and pharmaceutical companies are reaching out to capture potential products from other companies.

That played out at the recent Biotechnology Industry Organization convention in Chicago. While smaller, privately held companies continued to dominate the number of 15-minute pitches, South San Francisco-based biotech biggie Genentech Inc. and German goliath Bayer Schering Pharma AG also spun out appeals to smaller companies to sell out or partner up.

The list of big companies taking time slots to make similar pitches included the likes of Pfizer, Merck AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline.

Genentech is looking for acquisitions, licensing, options or other types of deals that can launch its nascent neuroscience and immunology businesses to a level on par with a cancer drug business that consists of blockbusters like Avastin and Herceptin, said James Sabry, Genentech’s vice president of partnering.

Bayer’s broad wish list also includes neurology, along with ophthalmology, hematology and cancer drugs, said Michael Yeomans, senior vice president and head of global business development and licensing for Bayer.

“We’re looking for products that can be real breakthroughs,” Yeomans said.

Two-thirds of the products in Bayer’s late-stage portfolio are partnered products, Yeomans said. That includes Nexavar, the cancer drug that Bayer is marketing for kidney and liver cancer with Emeryville’s Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc., but continues to develop for other cancer indications as well.

Products from another company should be complementary to Bayer HealthCare’s existing portfolio, Yeomans said, or “promising enough, with a large enough market size, to establish a franchise of (its) own.”

The number of one-on-one partnering meetings grew at this year’s BIO to at least 17,000, said Stephen Sherwin, BIO’s chairman and former CEO of South San Francisco’s Cell Genesys Inc.

None of the companies talked about how deep their wallets may be in seeking new, innovative products from up-and-coming companies. But there is a certain amount of desperation: More than $12 billion in revenue from current products will come off those big companies’ books this year as they lose patent protection and are challenged by makers of lower-priced generics.

That patent cliff is even steeper next year, with some $32 billion in revenue at risk, said Stephen Burrill of San Francisco-based life sciences merchant bank Burrill & Co.