The beginning of January and the heralding of a New Year brings with it the increasingly important J P Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco. With the main conference invitation only, it has spawned a series of satellite events for the industry.
The event is a bellwether for the fortunes of the wider life science industry for the next year so what did 2024 herald? Generally the mood was reported to be cautiously optimistic in contrast to the pessimism of 2023.
The conference saw significant announcements of acquisition deals by big Pharma – J&J; Novartis; MSD and GSK all capturing headlines with deals of respectively $2bn; $680m; $425m and $1.4bn. These followed closely on the December announcements of acquisitions by BMS and AstraZeneca. What do these mean for the wider industry?
These deals were all for later stage assets - so all of these companies were buying into more certainty of outcome. Following a period of few deals, these acquisitions may well represent the start of a new wave throughout the industry. However, with a focus on later stage its likely that for the moment the more risky early stage deals will continue to be difficult to get away – at least at a sensible premium.
There was no doubt that 2023 had been a challenging year for life science; a dramatic drop in IPO’s; the collapse of SVB and the repeated assertions that sector investors were keeping hold of funds they had to shore up existing investee companies rather than making new investments. There were indications at JP Morgan that there are more positive signs for companies seeking investment with life science VC’s such as Forbion and Orbimed raising significant funds. The general feeling was that there will be more liquidity in the market for investment.
AI has been a hot topic across many disciplines and sectors over the last year but JP Morgan reinforced its importance in life science. The applications are now extending across the whole of the industry during the R&D phases from clinical trial recruitment to data collection and analysis as well as in the commercialisation phases. There were also indications of future developments whereby synthetic data can be used to replace the placebo arm in drug trials. This could significantly speed up trials.
Areas highlighted as attracting interest for development in 2024 were therapies for CNS disorders with the recent heralded breakthroughs for Alzheimer’s treatments; vaccines (which have attracted significant governmental funding for broad-spectrum vaccines with the potential to prevent pandemic threats; and gene therapies and precision medicines are re-surfacing.
So if the portents are right 2024 looks like a better year – if not at the level of 2021, nonetheless a return to a degree of normalcy for the sector.
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