One of the great things about working in the pharma industry is the opportunity to listen to very clever people talking about fascinating topics and the latest trends in the market. Events like BIO-Europe are brilliant for this, and there is always plenty to unpack after the panels, keynotes and fireside chats have ended.

Our latest webinar did just that. We invited Daniel Chancellor and Melanie Senior, both fresh back from BIO-Europe in Stockholm, to share their thoughts on the sessions they attended and on the key themes from the event in a webinar. Naturally, there was a lot to discuss and I recommend you catch the on-demand version if you missed the live event. However, if you’re short on time, here are three things we learned in the webinar.

1. There’s been a shift in the dealmaking mindset of Big Pharma. 2024 has been a year of small M&A deals. The push to plug patent-loss gaps has left fewer late-stage biotechs available for Big Pharma to scoop up, so there are more deals around earlier-stage companies and assets. Our experts discussed if this was a good thing for the biotech eco-system. Should more biotechs stay independent and commercialise their products? Perhaps, but Melanie flagged an interesting shift in tone from Big Pharma companies. They are now proud to declare their share of externally-sourced assets, in contrast to a decade or so ago, when ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome was rife. Melanie noted a senior AbbVie BD exec’s claim that the company how has their highest ever proportion of externally-sourced assets, at close to 70%. Finding and securing outside assets is now a source of pride.
2. China was omnipresent at every session. Daniel detected a sentiment change in the way many people were looking at biotechs in China with search and evaluation teams now see Chinese companies as potential partners rather than as a competitive or IP threat. The collective Chinese pipeline has now overtaken that of European headquartered companies, albeit with a strong bias towards earlier stage assets. The BIOSECURE Act and other factors add risk to relationships with Chinese companies. But with words like “stunning” and “extraordinary” featuring at BIO-Europe to describe the pace of biotech development in China, it’s hard to see Chinese-Western partnerships slowing down.
3. You can’t predict the mood at JP Morgan, but we gave it a shot. One of our audience members challenged Melanie and Daniel to predict the mood at the JP Morgan conference in January. Despite what turned out to be somewhat mis-placed optimism at JPM 2024 (and despite some unusual health-related appointments by President-elect Trump), both felt the mood was likely to be on the sunnier side in January. The biopharma sector is a deal-driven industry; as Melanie put it “the engine needs oil, and the oil is deals”. So transactions will continue. A Republican administration may be friendlier to large deals and may focus its drug pricing bite on PBMs rather than on pharma companies.

We covered a huge amount more in the webinar and it’s a great way to catch up on the hot topics from BIO-Europe as well as to hear the key market trends as we hurtle towards 2025. The full recording is available here and you can check out our full webinar back catalogue as well as register for upcoming events here.