As we all know deal making is the life and blood of the biopharma industry and today this activity is truer than ever. In my experience of thirty years in deal making, companies who were most active and persistent in their deal making activity through both ups and downs tend to be more successful. An analysis of licensing after the 2007/8 crash shows that sentiment was shared by the industry as there was little let up in both the number of deals done and the upfront values negotiated. In fact, licensing has brought the biggest rewards to the most active licensors and licensees. Significant research has been funded by both venture capital and pharma licensing deals over the past 30 years which has given rise to significant breakthroughs in treatments for the greatest areas of unmet clinical need. The pipelines of pharma rely more than ever on innovation coming from smaller venture-backed biotech companies. This significant and diverse resource from biotech companies of patented technologies and products provides the lowest form of risk for the larger pharma companies building their vital clinical pipelines.

As drug development is a long-term effort pharma companies realise that their future superior commercial position and competitiveness in the post-pandemic market will be based on the deals they do today and not the ones they have delayed to tomorrow. They understand that delaying decisions on opportunities will only allow their competitors to seize the best ones. Additionally, they realise delaying will eat into the valuable patent lifetime and the consequent loss of revenue of these technologies and products.

Most biotech companies understand that stalling their out-licensing activities will result in their products losing their innovative appeal and become less attractive to pharma companies and at best be placed at the back of the line when they eventually go out to partner. The resulting lack of interest from pharma could impede further rounds of equity investment as these often go hand-in-hand.

We are currently running over 20 licensing and M&A mandates on behalf of clients and have seen continued activity across the board. This is because our industry is truly global, and we are used to working as teams across significant distances and time zones. With advances in communication technology lockdowns and working from home should not impede our ability to do deals as a significant part of the processes and analytics are done virtually these days or are outsourced to specialized advisors. Those that continue dealing making will be in pole position to be successful.

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About PharmaVentures

PharmaVentures is a premier transaction advisory firm; a world leader in partnering, M&A deals and strategic alliances. For the past 28 years, PharmaVentures has acted as advisor on over 700 deal related projects covering licensing, mergers, acquisitions, divestments and joint venture activities for companies world-wide.

Our unrivalled bank of specialist experience, deal analytics and network of contacts among innovators and large pharma makes us uniquely placed to support your business in all aspects of deal making and strategic planning. PharmaVentures is well known for its deep insight into deal structures and its success for generating partnering interest.

Our services include:

– M&A (divestments, mergers, acquisitions and strategic transactions)

– Strategy (commercialisation, deal strategy, due diligence, market entry)

– Valuation and Positioning (licensing, M&A, fund raising & expert testimonies)

– Licensing (in and out licensing)

– Expert Testimony (patent infringement, deal disagreements, taxation, determining damages)

– Fundraising

PharmaVentures is based in Oxford, UK, and employs over 20 professionals and has associates in N. America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific.

For further information, contact:

Dr Fintan Walton, CEO

PharmaVentures Ltd

T: +44 1865 332 700

E: enquiries@pharmaventures.com

PharmaVentures and PharmaTelevision are delighted to be Media Partners at the World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2015.

Dr Adrian Dawkes will be recording a series of interviews for PharmaTelevision with key people attending what looks to be a very exciting event.

A decade on and still strong: London celebrates the 10^th anniversary of World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress.

2005. What a year!

London was overjoyed at being elected as host city for the 2012 Olympics, but also devastated by the July 7th terror attacks. The death of Pope John Paul II, that same year, marked the end of an era in the life of the Roman-Catholic Church whilst in Germany, Angela Merkel becomes their first female Chancellor. 2005 also played host to Hurricane Katrina in the United States when it flooded New Orleans, the launch of YouTube and it is where Terrapinn’s stem cell story starts.

A decade later and it is a delight to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of an event that was key to the foundations of this medical revolution.

“10 years ago when we launched the World Stem Cells Congress, the stem cells sector was one of scientific interest. Focussing on the challenges of how to transform the cells, this conference and exhibition was quite small and the topic area quite niche. Attracting only around 80 people, word of the industry’s potential had not yet reached the masses”, says Derek Cavanagh, Project Manager of World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2015. He goes on to speak about how in about 2010 the sector underwent an important transition. Key industrial players as well as leading pharma companies had come to realise the commercial opportunities with stem cells, which would change the sector moving forward. 

This in turn was when the event would shift in focus from solely science to incorporate the commercial aspects as well. Both translational medicine and regenerative medicine were added to the conference programme, and an emphasis on achieving market access was enabling successful commercial development within the industry. As industry challenges shifted towards lack of investment and scaling up manufacturing and distribution, discussions moved on to the new business models that were coming into practice as the stem cell sector developed and moved away from traditional pharma models, which would inevitably catapult the industry to where we are now.

What is now the World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress is proud to be welcoming an audience of around 600 attendees to London this May. “This year we will be introducing additional content on tissue engineering and organ regeneration as well as the collocated Investor Forum and Cord Blood World Europe. Delegates will be able to hear and learn from over 70 speakers across the 3 days as well as partake in hundreds of meetings on-site as collaborations become key to commercial success of the industry” explains Hannah Yates, Conference Manager, World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2015.

With a large volume of business generated over the years at this event, key industry supporters such as Cell Therapy Catapult, GE Healthcare and Lonza, and leading keynote presentations from the likes of Chris Mason, Perry Karsen, Keith Thompson, Michael May and Susan Solomon, World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress is where the cell therapy and regenerative medicine sectors come to do business.

For more information, see the brochure at terrapinn.com /StemCellsBrochure

Event information:

10th Annual World Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2015

20 – 22 May 2015

Business Design Centre, London, UK

The debate and discussions in the media on the attempted bid by Pfizer for AstraZeneca (AZ) have largely revolved around the short term impact on jobs in the UK as well as the rights of shareholders and how corporations exploit tax loop holes.

The real question is how we as a society can actually find the drugs that are desperately needed for many incurable diseases? The Pfizer bid for AZ is only a symptom [no pun intended] of the continuous reconfiguring and restructuring of how pharmaceutical R&D can be performed so that we can efficiently find these cures.

How drugs are selected and finally make it to market is determined, quite correctly, through the scrutiny of the regulatory authorities such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). There is an inherent risk in taking a drug through clinical trials and less that 10% of drugs entering human clinical trials will make it to the patient. So how can companies reduce this risk and increase the chances of success?

Pharmaceutical companies have been grappling with the ‘how’ for the past two decades. Further more in recent years the landscape has been changing, for example, the regulatory hurdles, quite correctly, have been raised so the chances of finding the ‘right’ drug are lower and so more difficult. Both the pricing and reimbursement (P&R) of drugs place additional hurdles and additional risk on whether drug actually gets to the patient. In the UK P&R is regulated through the UK’s Department of Health via the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS) and the National Institutes of Care Excellence (NICE) respectively. This changed landscape has meant that pharmaceutical companies have had to rethink how they do research. The concept of large companies doing all their own drug research has been on the wane for years. Great ideas cannot emerge in one place they happen everywhere and there is evidence that smaller R&D groups are more productive than large ones. As such pharmaceutical companies have become more dependent on external R&D provided by universities, charities and venture capital backed biotechnology (biotech) companies. Moreover, pharma companies have been refocusing their efforts to a smaller group of therapeutic areas with the greatest unmet clinical need. For the past five years all major pharmaceutical companies have been reducing their internal R&D efforts and this, by the way, independent of the world economy.

Furthermore pharmaceutical companies have been moving their R&D activities to locations with the highest research skills, these include Cambridge, Mass, and Cambridge, England. This has meant moving away from ‘remote’ R&D sites which originated as manufacturing sites, such as AstraZeneca closing its Cheshire, Alderley Park site and moving to Cambridge and Pfizer moving away from Sandwich in Kent. Most of the large pharmaceutical companies have done similar moves.

This changed landscape means that pharmaceutical companies have had to raise the scrutiny of their existing drug candidates and abandon more of them. To replace them they need to either find more candidates from biotechs or acquire them through acquisitions like Pfizer’s bid for AZ or through deals such as Novartis acquiring GSK’s oncology franchise.

In the end a key driver is a focus on building the strongest product pipeline. Simply put companies can strengthen their pipeline through acquisition by keeping the best of the combined businesses and spinning out or axing the weaker candidates.  Regardless of whether Pfizer acquires AZ or not, the change in ‘how’ R&D is done will lead to further rationalisation of R&D and a greater role for biotech to be the key innovators and, as such, we should see a further rise in M&A as well as licensing and partnerships.