SAN DIEGO – At the Biocom 10th Annual Global Life Sciences Partnering Conference, panels of pharma executives highlighted what they're looking for to supplement their pipelines and offered advice that ran the gamut from company formation to the courting process to strategies for partnering pipeline drugs and platforms.

SAN DIEGO – At Biocom's 10th Annual Global Life Sciences Partnering Conference, a panel of players intimately familiar with last year's approval of myelofibrosis treatment Inrebic (fedratinib) explained the backstory of how they got the JAK2 kinase inhibitor off an FDA clinical hold, wrangled the rights to the drug back from the big pharma owner that had acquired the drug from Targegen Inc. and eventually helped the drug gain FDA approval after selling the rights to another large company.

Even as the volume of mergers and acquisitions in 2019 reached the highest level in the last 10 years, multiple big pharma companies are looking to get smaller, spinning off units into separate entities.

New gene therapy treatments could add $45 billion to the cost of health care over the next five years, according to a new report from CVS Health Corp., of Woonsocket, R.I. While the number is staggering, without knowing the price of the currently unapproved therapies, how many patients will seek treatment and the likelihood of approval, the pharmacy benefit manager's estimate is basically an educated guess.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are already being actively used in drug discovery to evaluate potential binding of small-molecule drugs to proteins, but there's potential for the technologies to be used on the development side as well, especially in hard-to-treat diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.