During a panel discussion at Biocom California's Global Life Sciences Partnering Conference, business development executives at various pharmaceutical companies advised biotech companies on everything from funding to manufacturing to deal structure.
With several more emergency use authorizations (EUAs) across the globe, COVID-19 efforts to flatten the emerging variants with cocktail therapies and tweaked vaccines are frantically underway. BioWorld has tracked 884 therapeutics and vaccines that have entered development for the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus since it first emerged more than a year ago, and the U.S. government has now provided EUAs to three vaccines and six therapies.
Without any mega-mergers completed in the first two months of 2021, M&A values have significantly plummeted from those recorded in each of the last two years, although both deals and M&As in January and February are tracking similarly to prior years in terms of volume.
While the new year has recorded a similar number of completed med-tech deals and M&As in comparison with the early months of 2020, the projected values of those transactions are up by 78% and 418%, respectively. Through this week, BioWorld has tracked 204 deals worth $144.65 million, and 62 M&As completed and valued at $12.8 billion, for the first months of 2021.
With the clock ticking on the urgent need to develop new antibiotics, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has given policy makers a sharp reminder that society should not lose focus on antibiotic resistance as well, which has the potential to dwarf COVID-19 in terms of deaths and economic costs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, noted in its Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the U.S. 2019 report that more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. Against a universal decline in the effectiveness of antibiotics, there has been a renaissance of interest in using phage therapy, whose use has waxed and waned for almost a century.
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