Nordic Life Science 1
T E X T by R I C HAR D HA Y H U R S T P H OT O b
y L U D W I G S CH E DL Well, BIO-Europe itself has certainly come a fair distance – “We’re celebrating 25 years since we started with just 80 delegates in Hannover when the talk was all about small molecules and partnering was arranged via postit notes!” EBD Founder and Managing Director, Pam Putz reminded us in the opening session in Hamburg. This year set new records with 4,400 delegates from 61 countries holding a scarcely believable 27,400 meetings. You could then probably at least double the number of interactions if you add on exhibit visits and networking discussions. Thus my overriding impression was that what was started as a Baby Bio has really come of age. Conference organisers always have a delicate balancing act to play matching the needs of delegates and sponsors. How to ensure for example that exhibitors get footfall, partnering meetings are productive and the programme is interesting. In this respect BIO-Europe seems on the cusp – most of the delegates I met managed to do all three, but it was a struggle mainly due to the sheer number of partnering requests received – up to 30 in some cases. To lose this would be a shame. Starting with the programme – see the Top 10 sidebar – the opening plenary alone gave me enough food for thought to last at least through till BIO-Europe Spring in Paris in March. To take just a few nuggets, David Thomas of BIO started by warning the industry not to be complacent. In the US, investors are clearly holding back with the Biotech Index down 14%. This could be due to the political climate says Thomas: “We’re hearing policy makers saying “We’re fine with less innovation, we’re fine with less medicines for patients, as long as prices come down.”” However, he went on to note that deals are continuing, predicting they would end close to where they were last year. R&D-stage out-licencing deals are running at 126 at the start of November compared to 160 in 2018. “We are also seeing a pick-up in clinical-stage deals, with up-front payments – already running at $11.9 billion – set to create a new record. Finally, Thomas noted a much bigger emphasis on acquisitions of newly emerged companies with regulatory approval and less than $1 billion in sales – such as Novartis and Spark, Pfizer and Array Biopharma, and Eli Lilly of Loxo Oncology. Most interesting was that big pharma easily has sufficient buying power if they want to continue this bolt-on derisked M&A approach – the top 22 have $200 billion in cash and the 48 potential targets Thomas has identified would cost “only” $100 billion. Mike Ward’s Top Ten provided the perfect warm-up for the opening panel discussion chaired by Kate Bingham of Schroeders. Points that particularly resonated for me were Fredrich von Bohlen of Molecular Health GmbH predicting that the challenge of digital technologies and encroachment of Google and Amazon means that the sector will need to “inhale” precision medicine. “Roche to me were the forerunner 25 years ago. But the future will involve an increasingly dense analysis of individuals’ health and disease data and new and as yet unknown models of data sharing and monetization to incentivize individuals to share their information. Computing is essential to that transformation to a truly preventive vision of healthcare, but it is not the main driver. I think the real transformation is biology.”