With valuations heading higher, pharmaceutical companies are looking to make deals. “The M&A environment has kind of woken up a little bit,” Jay Stamatis, vice president and head of business development and acquisitions at Abbvie Inc., told the audience at Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference.
Venture capitalists (VCs) on three different panels at Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference gave advice to startups on a range of topics from what they’re looking for before investing to what startups should be doing to find pharma partners.
In a panel discussion with executives at the 2024 BIO CEO conference this week in New York, the consensus emerged that artificial intelligence is here to stay, despite its occasional moments of hype, as its applications continually grow.
Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference kicked off with a panel discussion focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery. While there’s been a lot of hype over how AI and machine learning have the potential to help companies speed up drug development, panelists hypothesized the largest opportunities are in developing new capabilities, potentially increasing the success rate going from discovery to regulatory approval.
Drug pricing is playing an outsized role in the dynamics of the November U.S. election, creating turbulence for drug companies and for patients that will extend years after the votes are counted. During a Feb. 27 morning session on drug pricing trends during an election year at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference in New York, key opinion leaders spoke about their concerns, including the need to explain drug-pricing rationale to voters and patients in plain terms.
Companies and investors, well aware of the natural up and down fluctuations of the market, keep expecting the current downturn to end. They’ve been expecting it to begin an upturn for the past two years. During a Feb. 26 session on venture capital trends at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference in New York, investors said the tough times might well extend further into 2024 than they would like.
Helping executive and investors prepare for better economic times is a strong theme in the upcoming BIO CEO 2024 conference, which runs Feb. 26 and 27 in New York. The annual conference, sponsored by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, is designed to present a broad, unbiased view of investment opportunities. Panels of experts are set to discuss hot therapeutic areas and the key business issues facing companies and the industry.
The biological processes giving rise to the central nervous system symptoms of long COVID remain a mystery. But multiple studies suggest they do not appear to be a result of a direct viral infection of brain tissue. The latest such research, which appeared online in Nature Neuroscience on Feb. 16, 2024, demonstrated that local immune response in brain tissues persisted long after SARS-CoV-2 virus had disappeared.
4DMT Molecular Therapeutics Inc. is looking ahead to phase III as positive data continue to roll out for gene therapy candidate 4D-150 in wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), with the results from the phase II portion of the phase I/II Prism trial showing the single-shot treatment significantly reduced the need for chronic anti-VEGF injections. Presented over the weekend at the Angiogenesis, Exudation, and Degeneration 2024 Conference, results from the 24-week dose-expansion cohort, which comprised wet AMD patients with severe disease and high treatment burdens, showed patients receiving the high dose (3E10 vg/eye) had a 90% reduction in annualized anti-VEGF injection rates.
Shares of Corbus Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:CRBP) doubled on opening Jan. 26 and ended the day up a whopping 249% as investors got a look at data from a first-in-human study testing next-generation Nectin-4-targeted antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) CRB-701. Licensed from CSPC Pharmaceutical Group for $7.5 million up front in February 2023, CRB-701 has IND clearance from the U.S. FDA, and Corbus plans to start its own clinical testing in the first quarter of 2024.