According to Janet Lambert, CEO of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM), in her delivery of the international advocacy group’s state of the industry briefing at Biotech Showcase in San Francisco, 2019 proved to be a significant year of growth for the regenerative medicine sector.
Adding further evidence about the global threat of the increase of antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) infections and dearth of new antibiotics to treat those conditions, Thomas Cueni, chair of the AMR Industry Alliance, said the findings from the alliance’s newly released report are “a wake-up call” as they estimate current investments in AMR-relevant R&D are not enough to sustain a viable pipeline that will be needed to combat infectious diseases globally.
According to Janet Lambert, CEO of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM), in her delivery of the international advocacy group’s state of the industry briefing at Biotech Showcase in San Francisco, 2019 proved to be a significant year of growth for the regenerative medicine sector.
Investors have grown accustomed to hearing news of major announcements from big pharma and blue chip biotech companies during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference week. However, as it turned out, headline catalysts were in short supply. In the absence of any major M&A deals taking place, the event turned out to be unusually muted.
Delegates convening in San Francisco Monday for the 38th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference and other related biotechnology conferences running at the same time will certainly be in a better frame of mind than just 12 months ago. Back then, the sector had just come off a terrible fourth quarter, with investors shying away from biopharma company equities big time.
Despite a rough ride on the capital markets for much of the year, particularly in the second and third quarters, this did not prevent the biopharmaceutical sector from attracting a significant amount of capital. According to BioWorld, when the curtain closed on 2019, approximately $57.6 billion had been generated by global public and private companies.
Investors warmed to biopharma company equities, particularly in the final quarter of the year, with the BioWorld Biopharmaceutical Index increasing 23% in value during this period, helping the group climb to a respectable 14% for the year after being underwater from April through to September.
After a flurry of activity in December, when the FDA approved seven new molecular entities (NMEs), the total of novel drugs that were given the green light this year reached 48, a number that ranks third behind the record 59 new medicines the agency approved last year and 53 in 1996.
The next wave of drug discovery is being enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). This fact has not been lost on investors, who are keeping a close watch on emerging biopharma companies that are using AI and machine learning to enable the discovery of next-generation medicines.
