In the face of the short supply of venture capital, the U.K. biotech sector weathered the storm in 2023, raising a total of £1.25 billion (US$1.6 billion) across 69 deals. That was 6% down on 2022, but has to be seen against the backdrop of U.K. VC investment across all sectors falling by a massive 43%. With follow-on financing by quoted companies, biotechs raised £1.8 billion overall.
Making them an antibiotic of last resort, the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency introduced new restrictions on the use of fluoroquinolones due to the risk of potentially long-term or irreversible side effects.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have identified a proteomic signature that could recognize long COVID six months after acute infection. Biologically, the signature indicated that the complement system remained active in patients with long COVID six months after infection. Translationally, it could lead to a diagnostic test for long COVID, and suggests that targeting the complement system could be a therapeutic approach to prevent or treat the disorder.
The EMA has once again come in behind the U.S. FDA, granting market access to 77 new products in 2023, fewer than half the 157 approvals the FDA processed in the 11 months from January through December 2023.
Six weeks after the U.S. FDA issued an alert, the EMA is following suit and starting a review of the safety of six approved CAR T-cell cancer therapies, following 23 reports of patients developing secondary cancers. The EMA said such malignancies were considered “an important potential risk” at the time of approval and are included in the risk management plan. Close monitoring is in place, with companies required to conduct long-term safety and efficacy follow-up studies and to file safety update reports.
As their term in office winds to a close, MEPs in the two main political groupings of the European Parliament still have huge differences of opinion over the proposed reform of the EU pharmaceutical regulation and how best to achieve the stated aims of improving patient access whilst encouraging innovation.
Pharma companies facing the pricing pressures unleashed by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act will find little respite in European markets in 2024, as governments erect higher market access hurdles around pricing and reimbursement in a bid to constrain drug budgets.
Following the decision of Australia’s Therapeutic Drugs Administration to allow prescribing of MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression from July 2023, and with U.S. FDA approval of MDMA for treating PTSD expected in 2024, the EMA is under increasing pressure to set out a path to approval for psychedelics.
Given the challenges of generating chemistry, manufacturing and control information on the compressed timelines used in the EMA’s Priority Medicines scheme and the U.S. FDA’s breakthrough therapy designation program, the two regulators published a joint question-and-answer document discussing quality and good manufacturing practice aspects of applications for both programs, which are aimed at speeding development of innovative products to address unmet medical needs.
A catastrophe was averted over the weekend of March 11-12, 2023, when the U.K. government and the Bank of England orchestrated the rescue of the U.K. arm of Silicon Valley Bank, after its U.S. parent was shut down by the receiver. While that saved dozens of small biotechs with large deposits at the bank, it signified the fragile economic environment during the year, compounded by wider geopolitical frictions, with a market described by Chris Hollowood, CEO of Syncona Investment Management, as “the worst in my career.”
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