If there’s one thing that the experts at Evaluate love, it’s rummaging around in data to identify trends in the pharma market. One area that is always fascinating to explore is dealmaking trends – and that’s just what my colleagues Ben Folwell and Duncan Sweeney did during our recent webinar, “Licence Drivers: Trends in Pharma Dealmaking”.
If you missed it, the full recording is available on demand so you can review at your convenience. As well as the Evaluate team, we were delighted to be joined by two experts from industry; Arun Bisht, Head of C&BD Excellence and Operations at Novartis and Moustapha El-Amine, VP, Head of Business Development at Insmed.
If you’ve not got time to watch the webinar right now, here are three things we learned during the session:
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- Deals are happening earlier: Ben and Duncan shared data that breaks down Big Pharma in-licensing deals by phase, and since 2021 there has been a shift. There is an increasing proportion of top pharma deals focused on pre-clinical and phase 1 assets. In 2024 (YTD), 65% of deals were in these early stages compared to just 23% in 2021 when there was a bigger focus on later stage, derisked deals. This was borne out by the conversation with our guest speakers. Moustapha explained that the state of the market and funding scarcity means that biotechs are often looking to do deals earlier. The upside for the larger partner can be the ability to guide clinical trial design and ensure due diligence is done correctly.
- Smart dealmaking can help businesses to retain critical scientific talent: As the panel discussed innovative deal structures, Arun highlighted the importance of an effective partnership between the two sides of a transaction. He pointed to a deal that Novartis did last year that involved spinning out a new, joint business that enables them to retain the scientific talent from the other company. This provides Novartis with a great resource for the future and enables a hugely talented team to continue their work together.
- There are plenty of unpartnered assets to keep an eye on: Unpartnered assets are always an interesting area and Ben highlighted four for consideration. They span a range of indications including big diseases like MASH, obesity and Epilepsy as well as rare diseases like Angelman syndrome. Some of these are still in early stages of development but all have NPVs of over $3bn and potential launch dates in the next couple of years.
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We’re hugely grateful to our guest speakers for sharing their expertise during the webinar. If you have time, I recommend diving into the full session here. And if you’d like to learn even more, we have two short webinars focused on best practices for in-licensing and out-licensing.
If you’d like to check out our other on-demand webinars, you’ll find them on our webinar page.
