Healthcare Header
 
title
 

 

November 22nd, 2023 READ OUR REPORT - Download
 

 

We will not be issuing a weekly report this upcoming week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. but instead, please find above a link to a publication highlighting progress in the biotech sector and the case for investing in it.

With the recent market downturn and the state of market sentiment we thought it would benefit to review sector positives.

The underlying fundamentals of the biotech sector could not be more positive.

There are seven good reasons to like biotech as a place to invest today:

  1. Returns in biotech have beat the market over a long period of time;
  2. Valuations are highly attractive by historic standards;
  3. The macroeconomic picture is shifting to favor biotech;
  4. Pharma has little choice but to be a heavy acquiror of biotech;
  5. Growth in medical spend will accelerate as an inevitable byproduct of economic growth;
  6. The pace of biomedical innovation, the ultimate fundamental, is accelerating; and
  7. Medical innovation is going to change our civilization.

We believe that there is a good case to be made that the life sciences sector will be the preeminent driver of economic growth in the global economy and stock market performance for decades to come.

Some have called this the Biotech Century. We will only know if this is hyperbole in retrospect, but our instinct is that the characterization is a good one.

With today’s headlines, it’s easy to become concerned about the financial markets for biotech.

The last three years have seen multiple permutations of what can go wrong when greed and fear collide in a market that combines fast trading with emerging companies developing risky, long-duration science-based projects.

Despite an abundance of highly intelligent actors, the post-Pandemic biotech market has been more challenging than any of us would have liked. We have seen market disruption and widespread biowreckage caused by unexpectedly high interest rates linked to post-Pandemic inflation.

Many investors have abandoned the biotech marketplace altogether.

Sentiment today is at rock bottom.

We now find ourselves at a point where the macroeconomic hurricane is moving out to sea, and it is time for investors to come off the sidelines and return to the market.

Hence this report.

We are going to review the arguments in favor of returning to the biotech market.

 

We are Early in the Long-Term Innovation Boom

Our most important message today is a simple one. Acceleration of innovation will make today’s biotech market travails irrelevant. 

Growing societal wealth coupled with the natural human demand for a long high-quality life is going to drive enormous demand for the bioscience products. This will be expressed over decades and will wash away temporal concerns that one might have about politics, budgets and the IRA.

Indeed, if one looks back to the medical world of the 1920s and 1930s – it all looks very quaint and, from today’s financial perspective, small time.

There was less than $500 million in total global pharma sales. Lilly shut their R&D lab for the winter and Pfizer was principally in the chocolate business. Infectious disease was the top cause of death, as we hadn’t yet discovered the antibiotic.

Likewise, decades from now, when one looks back at current circumstances the same is likely to be true.

Today’s biopharma and life sciences sectors will very likely look small time relative to what is to come.

The potential financial scale and human impact of bioscience innovation is far larger than most of us might dare imagine.

Fifty years from now, no one will remember how many companies had to do a reverse merger in 2023 or how many traded below cash. No one will remember which pharmas had to reset earnings expectations or dropped a few products from their R&D pipeline.

In a preview of what is to come, the recent interest in obesity drugs highlights the notion that there could be a drug product that has revenue on the same scale as the largest products in our society.

The day could come when GLP-1’s beat the iPhone in sales and profitability.

At some level, government and employer desire to throttle demand are not relevant when the average American is willing to spend $500 a month out of pocket to achieve and maintain normal weight.

Not to mention, it can become an issue for employees and those in power in government if they dare not reimburse drug products that change the life course of citizens and employees.

The key fundamental of the bioscience sector is the exponential growth of scientific knowledge and its application.

This has been the result of a long historic Enlightenment that began with Descartes, Galileo and many other brave souls.

And despite one’s worst suspicions garnered from current political discourse, the main dividends of the Enlightenment lay ahead of us.

Progress in the understanding of biology is going to be of primary importance to humankind.

It’s not about pharmaceuticals, medical devices or life sciences tools.

These are important industries that commercialize the products of knowledge.

Rather, it’s the knowledge itself that is going to change humanity.

We are fortunate to live in a moment when the first gene edited drug has been approved and, in a year when decades of work on amyloid clearing and GLP-1s have led to transformative treatments for neurodegeneration and metabolic disease.

These are historic moments for our civilization.

Biologic innovation has been civilization changing for millennia and will continue to be for many more.

The opportunities to impact human life and civilization using breakthroughs in areas like autophagy, cellular reprogramming, gene editing, immunology, incretin biology, RNA, bioelectronics, proteomics and synthetic biology remain early in their development.

 

Historic Returns from Biopharma Investment

We have asked quite a few people the following question: if you bought an index of biopharma stocks in 1999 and a similar index of tech stocks in 1999, where would you have done better?

Almost everyone answered that tech outperformed.

The answer is the opposite.

An investment in the Nasdaq Biotech Index in 1999 would have made you eight times your money between then and now.

An investment into a tech sector ETF (we picked the XLK) would have delivered four times your money.

If you put the money, in contrast, into the S&P 500, you would have got 2.4 times your money.

Biotech has performed really well.

And, over the last 30 years, biotech stocks, proxied by the Nasdaq Biotech Index, are up 20 times.

When one looks at the underlying market trend, it’s very clear that biotech investing involves a long-term uptrend.

Of course, one must be prepared for occasional long periods of flat or even poor performance. We are going through that now.

We then asked whether recent decades have been exceptional.

That is, maybe the 2000 to 2023 period was just good for an otherwise mediocre industry.

Fortunately for us, a group of very bright researchers at MIT took the time to put together pharma and biotech industry returns going way back.

For pharma they were able to use the CRSP tapes with stock return data from the NYSE and NASDAQ going back to 1930. Of course, there was no biotech back then, so they first started measuring biotech returns in 1980.

Between 1930 and 2015 there were 17 five-year investment periods. An equal-weighted portfolio of all traded pharma stocks beat the market portfolio in 12 of those time periods – or 70.5% of the time.

Extraordinarily, even though there were 3 five-year time periods when one would have lost money owning the market portfolio, there was never a single five-year time period when a pharma portfolio lost money in the 85 years between 1930 and 2015.

Between 1980 and 2015 there were 7 five-year investment periods. Both biotech and pharma portfolios beat the market portfolio in 5 of the 7 time periods (71% of the time). The average return on the market in the 35 years between 1980 and 2015 was 11%. The average return on a portfolio of all pharma stocks was 13% and the average return on a portfolio of all biotech stocks in the same time period was 14%.

Bottom line: for the last ninety years, biopharma investments have crushed it.

To put this in perspective, the three-percentage point difference in returns from pharma investments relative to the market for the last 93 years translates into ending up with 12.5 times more money at the end of the time period.

A further question might relate to the type of investment.

Sure, public investments did well recently but what about private investment? After all, a huge amount of the money put to work is in private deals and not in the public market.

We, unfortunately, do not have data for privates going back as far as we do for publics. But, we do have data for the last five years. Biotech venture capital has substantially outperformed the market in the last five years.

And, Cambridge Associates reports that venture capital across the market has beat the stock market by about seven percentage points over the last 25 years.

To summarize, evidence going back to the 1930s shows that the biopharmaceutical industry has been a good place to invest relative to the overall stock market. While it’s well known that past performance is not necessarily predictive of future returns, we can say that there are numerous reasons to think that fundamental investment conditions today for the biopharma sector are, if anything, better than in the past.

A big one is the shift to drug development based on genetic evidence. Drugs that are designed and developed with a genetic rationale, on average, have much higher approval probabilities.

 

Valuations are Attractive Now

We have spent the last 30 months in a heavy shake out of the biopharma industry.

There are over 200 companies trading below their cash at present.

The total public biotech sector has dropped in value by 70% over the last 31 months.

If you added up the value of every public biotech company in the world today it would be $173 billion. This is just 6% of what the total pharma is worth.

We like the recent quote from Rajiv Kaul, the Fidelity biotech investor:

“So, there’s a lot of pain out there. And … a long-term investment perspective is what we take here at Fidelity. We’re trying to build some of the most amazing biotech companies of the future and that takes a long time and requires a lot of capital. And it’s not easy to get breakthrough drugs that are transformative for patients and payors. So, if you have that sort of mindset that you would like to stay with… I don’t know if I could pick a better time [to invest in biotech]. I don’t want to hype it obviously. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next month, next three months or this year.”

It's worth remembering that we’ve all been here before. The period of 2002 and 2003 was a particularly grim one for our industry – not at all dissimilar to today.

In 2002 there was an environment of high rates, massive pressure on pharma earnings, patent challenges and a perception of earnings disappointments. Sentiment was dark and the thought was that the pharma industry would never recover.

Frank Baldino, CEO of Cephalon, complained at the time that even with good Phase 2 data a company would struggle to get good meetings with institutional investors.

Sound familiar?

It’s worth noting that as this pessimistic view bottomed out in 2003 the market subsequently turned around. The value of the Nasdaq Biotech Index went up three times in the next decade.

In 2016 we ran into the same pessimism again. This time it was “déjà vu all again.” Big pharma dealmaking was restrained. The government was talking about price controls. And biotech IPOs and follow-ons grounded to a halt.

Of course, in the famous words of Lord Rothschild “the best time to buy is when there is blood in the streets.” The value of the XBI more than tripled in the five year period after 2016.

To summarize, we find ourselves today near a low point in biotech investor sentiment. The XBI is trading at around 72 – well down from where it has been in recent years. Investors, in general, are concerned and many are pulling out of the market.

There is a fundamental explanation of what’s been happening. High interest rates have been a negative for long duration investments like biotech. Our data would suggest that sentiment is also playing a role. Many market events and observations are hard to explain with any fundamental story linked to interest rates.

Importantly, the research shows that negative sentiment tends to be self-correcting. It can only stay down for so long in the face of improving fundamentals. And improve they have. As noted in the next section, employment pressure on prices is easing and inflation has been falling.

History bears this out and shows that periods of very poor sentiment in the biotech market have been followed by outstanding investor returns.

 

Improving Macro Picture

The big news in the last month was that October U.S. CPI inflation came in at 3.2%.

This is way down from recent levels and when considered together with much weakened employment numbers, paints a picture of a slowing U.S. economy.

Specifically, the slowing economic pace means that the Fed is unlikely to continue to increase the Fed Funds rate and much more likely to consider rate cuts in 2024.

In symphony with all of this, the all-important 10-year U.S. Treasury yield is down a whopping 50 basis points over the last month.

This is a huge move in Treasury yields and enormously positive news for biotech.

You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at the biotech market. As we write this on Nov 22nd, the XBI, an ETF that broadly follows the biopharma sector, stands at a tepid 72.

Down for the year. And down 8% over the last three months.

In fact, the XBI has been down for each of the last three years as investors have fled the biotech sector.

Investor sentiment has not begun to recover with widespread pessimism pervading the sector in a week of celebration, turkey, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes.

Rumors of fund capitulations abound in the market and few financings have been getting done in recent weeks.

Another recent phenomenon that illustrates the biotech market’s slow response to the changing macro picture is growing divergence between the S&P 500 Index and the XBI.

Over the last three years, the S&P has outperformed the XBI by a whopping 70 percentage points. And, yet, as macro data has become more favorable in recent weeks, the S&P has continued to outperform.

Biotech has been in a sort of suspended animation despite improving fundamentals.

None of us pretend that the road to recovery of the market from here will be easy.

But it is important recall in the context of historic Fed tightening cycles that biotech has rallied well before the Fed has started to drop the Fed Funds rate.

As interest rates drop in symphony with improving inflation numbers it will be hard for the wide divergence in biotech / broader market performance to persist.

If you will, significant latent energy is in place to create a sustained rally in biotech including great innovation fundamentals, high short interest, depressed valuations and substantial capital in dedicated funds that is sitting in cash.

Perhaps most importantly, when investors start to make money again, we will see more going on to the long side.

We have spoken to a number of high performing funds that have been shifting their books to a long bias in recent weeks, recognizing that a recovery in biotech is likely to unfold from here.

 

Pharma Needs to Acquire Biotech

A fourth reason to take a bullish view on biotech is the likelihood of high forward M&A activity.

Between 2024 and 2028 there is at least $140 billion of pharma revenue at risk from patent expiries.

Unfortunately, history tells us that pharma internal R&D is not that productive. A recent Deloitte report pegged recent R&D investment by big pharma as having a zero ROI.

Hard to believe, really.

Not surprisingly, pharma has had little choice but to go outside to access drug innovation – typically through the M&A market.

One recent study in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery found that fully 66% of pharma drug launches in the 2015 to 2021 period were for products that were brought in from the outside.

Cracks in pharma revenue forecasts have been relatively abundant in the recent earnings period with growth forecast and earnings resets from four of the top pharma companies.

Matt Gline, CEO of Roivant said it well recently:

“There’s a major cataclysmic set of changes happening basically at all of these large pharma companies. All of this is happening against the backdrop of trying to manufacture their growth story for the next decade.”

We would also note that big pharma is positioned to do it. We define comfortable M&A firepower as the amount of debt capacity a company has with existing cash flows to take their ratio of debt to EBITDA up to 3 times.

By our estimate, there is over $500 billion of comfortable firepower in big pharma today.

Not surprisingly, we have already seen a lot of M&A activity unfold in 2023. Big pharma biotech acquisition volume in 2023 was near record levels despite IRA/FTC Uncertainties.

We expect to see high M&A volume continue (and, potentially, increase) in 2024.

We expect M&A interest in 2024 to be highest in cardiometabolic disease, immunology, oncology, genetic disease and neurologic diseases. Buyers have a strong preference for differentiated, late-stage assets with long-term exclusivity potential.

It’s fairly obvious that pharma has little choice but to aggressively acquire biotech companies to replace products that they can’t make themselves.

 

Medical Spend Will Accelerate in the Future

A critical reason to be bullish on the biopharma sector is that medical spend will accelerate in the future.

Spend on healthcare and medicines is continually on the mind of the global consumer – for good reason.

The modern period has been defined by rapid and continual expansion of national spending on healthcare through health insurance policies.

It’s perhaps forgotten that most countries, including the United States, did not have good insurance coverage for healthcare prior to the 1980s.

The advent of health insurance and government health coverage across industrialized countries has been associated with a massive increase in healthcare expenditures as a share of GDP.

One hundred years ago, total healthcare expenditure relative to GDP was less than one percent in most major countries. Today, it averages around 8% in most countries and is, by some measures, greater than 20% in the United States.

U.S. pharma spend in inflation-adjusted terms is up more than five hundred times over the last ninety years.

That reveals a number of simple truths about biopharma:

  1. As incomes rise, consumers are able to cover their basic needs of food, shelter and transportation. Once this happens, spend on healthcare tends to rise rather rapidly.
  2. Economics call healthcare a superior good. We spend a higher percent of our incomes on it when we make more money. In some ways it is the ultimate superior good. Try asking a billionaire how much of their money they would spend if they could live another year. You’ll quickly find out that demand is incredibly inelastic when lifespans are at stake.
  3. Biopharma spend is closely tied to GDP growth. GDP reflects society overall income generative capacity and, in country after country, pharma spend rises with GDP but at a faster rate than GDP growth.

PWC forecasts that the U.S. economy will grow at 1.8% in real terms (inflation-adjusted) through 2050.

The global economy will grow faster.

Using the econometric relationship between GDP growth and pharma spend, we should expect to see U.S. pharma spend nearly double by 2050 (only 27 years to go) and global pharma spend more than triple.

A further critical factor is the aging of the population. The reality is that we spend a lot more on pharma when we are sick. And, we are a lot more likely to get sick when we are old.

Today, approximately 65 million people are on Medicare in the U.S. That number will cross 90 million people by 2060.

Globally, by 2060, there will be over 1.7 billion persons over the age of 65.

This is a huge positive for humankind and the biopharma industry.

Because humans are living longer, they necessarily need to spend more money on medicines – independent of their incomes.

As persons live longer in industrialized countries, their lifetime demand for pharmaceutical and other medical products will rise rapidly.

In past decades a person may not have survived their first chronic disease whether it be cardiovascular disease or HIV.

As therapies continue to come online to treat these diseases, persons are increasingly likely to face second, third- and fourth-line chronic disease states – particularly diseases of the aged such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

Thus, there is an interesting positive feedback loop at play. The more we spend on healthcare as a society, the longer we live. The longer we live, the more we have to spend on healthcare.

To summarize: Medical Products / Pharma spend is going to rise at an increasing rate for the foreseeable future.  Concerns about the IRA, budget deficits etc. miss the larger picture about the effect of rising incomes and longer life spans on medical spend. There is a key positive feedback loop that many don’t see: the more we spend on medicine, the longer we live. The longer we live, the more we have to spend on medicine.

 

Biomedical Innovation is Accelerating

There has been massive change in medicine and biopharma over the last 100 years.

For example, in 1923:

  • The combined market cap of the pharma sector was less than a half billion dollars.
  • Insulin’s role in diabetes had just been discovered. But insulin was extracted from pigs.
  • We did not understand genetics in any meaningful way.
  • The leading cause of death was infectious disease. There were no antibiotics.
  • Life expectancy at birth was 54 years in the U.S. In China it was 35 years.
  • U.S. consumers spent less than 5% of their income on healthcare and less than 1% of their income on pharmaceuticals.

In contrast, in 2023:

  • Mortality rates from major diseases including heart disease, cancer and stroke are down dramatically.
  • We understand genetics and can manipulate aberrant genes.
  • Life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 79 years. In China it is 77. For a Japanese female it is over 90.
  • Global Pharmaceutical sales are approximately $1.2 trillion
  • The value of the pharma sector is over $6 trillion (up one thousand-fold from the 1920s).
  • U.S. consumers spent nearly a fifth of their income on healthcare and more than 3% of their income on pharmaceutical products.

It’s fairly clear that this type of change is not going to slow down.

Rather, we see acceleration of underlying innovation driving the biotech sector:

  • Rapidly increasing sophistication of molecular diagnostic tools
  • Deeper understanding of the genetic mechanisms of disease
  • Deeper understanding of the brain
  • Deeper understanding of how to control diseases at their genetic sources by restoring correctly formed proteins or preventing production of malformed proteins
  • New technologies in gene sequencing, gene therapy, gene editing and RNAi
  • Enormous potential to apply proteomic and metabolomic tools to create precision medicines for patients
  • Deeper understanding of how multiple underlying areas of core physiology (e.g., extracellular matrix deposition, immune function, mitochondrial function, ubiquitination, autophagy, ferroptosis) relate to disease
  • Synthetic biology and ability to impact medicine and broader goods and services
  • Advent of AI and digital technologies – with profound implications for design of drugs, execution of trials and delivery of medicine
  • Advent of bioelectronics and ability to control disease with read / write access to the central nervous system
  • Improved access to medicines globally

The combined effect of these and many other innovations on human life spans in this century will be dramatic.

To illustrate, in just the last 18 months we have seen the following breakthroughs:

  • Doubling of survival from prostate cancer with PSMA-617
  • Gene therapy for sickle cell disease approved
  • Semaglutide and Tirzepatide approved for obesity
  • A good blood test for Alzheimer’s Disease developed and introduced
  • MDMA for severe PTSD
  • Trials that show that psychedelics can make a dramatic difference in depression
  • First approval of a gene edited product
  • Doubling of survival from advanced ovarian cancer
  • Endometriosis largely caused by a bacterium
  • AI can diagnose diseases surprisingly well
  • Stem cell therapy has major impact on Parkinson’s
  • First good Alzheimer’s drug approved
  • Good drug approved for geographic atrophy
  • Obesity drugs control over a dozen diseases

Rebecca Sykes, Portfolio Manager in Healthcare, Wellington Management said it well recently:

“The innovations happening in the biopharma industry today are some of the most exiting I’ve seen in my career.”

Linden Thomson, Portfolio Manager at AXA Framlington echoed these comments recently:

“We expect the first gene-editing drug to be approved this year, taking genetic medicines one step further. These treatments and drugs give just a brief glimpse at the innovation that is taking place in the biotechnology sector today. Companies across the industry are harnessing genetics to develop their pipelines, building on the advances of the last 70 years to remain at the cutting edge today. We believe that more diseases will find new treatments and perhaps even a cure - and for long-term investors, there is also the scope to potentially reap rewards while funding this vital innovation.”

One objective measure of the level of innovation is the volume of biomedical publishing. PubMed aggregates publication information in medicine. PubMed shows that there were 400,000 biosciences papers published in 1998. Last year, the number was close 1.6 million (up 400%).

 

Biotech and Civilization

When we begin conversations with investors and biotech executives, they typically begin with the question, “what do you see happening next year?” Or, “what’s it going to take for the financing market to open up?”

While these are highly relevant questions, we never get asked the question that really matters: “just how much is biotech going to change our civilization?”

Lest you think we have now drifted fully into the zone hyperbole, we should review some interesting scholarly work on the topic:

  1. Jared Diamond received the Pulitzer Prize for his book entitled Guns, Germs and Steel which reviewed human history for the last five thousand years. Diamond argues geographic, climatic and environmental characteristics which favored early development of stable agricultural societies ultimately led to immunity to diseases endemic in agricultural animals and the development of powerful, organized states capable of dominating others. A key point in his book is that immunity from disease was one of the most important factors in allowing early agrarian societies to grow and thrive. This observation, obviously, is highly relevant today.
  2. David Clark’s book Germs, Genes, and Civilization explores how epidemics have transformed human history, over and over again, from ancient Egypt to Mexico, the Romans to Attila the Hun. The Black Death epidemic ended the Middle Ages, making possible the Renaissance, western democracy, and the scientific revolution. His key point is that our ability to overcome epidemics has been the principal driver of human progress.
  3. Steven Johnson’s recent book A Short History of Living Longer makes a similar point but in a more modern context.  In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over forty years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than eighty years. He notes that there are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this increased longevity. He attributes this largely to vaccines, public health measures and modern drugs. He notes that the development of penicillin in the last century was unquestionably associated with step change up in human life spans. Johnson sees the pharma sector as one of the main success drivers of today’s modern civilization.
  4. Greg Zuckerman’s book, A Shot to Save the World reviews the story of COVID vaccines. Humanity developed and delivered mRNA vaccines using an unproven technology in less than two years. This technology ultimately altered the planet – allowing humanity to come out of isolation and begin to work together again.

We liked the recent quote from Stanford’s Eliot Hershberg who wrote:

What a time to be alive. As a species, we’ve arrived at an unprecedented moment in Evolution. We can now read, write, and edit DNA—the source code of all living organisms. Advances in DNA sequencing technology have outpaced Moore’s Law, becoming the ‘broadly enabling microscope’ of the 21st century. DNA synthesis costs have also exponentially decreased. CRISPR has transformed gene editing from a bespoke, error-prone, and laborious process into a programmable task routinely carried out by graduate students around the world.”

Heady stuff to be sure. We thought it would be interesting to contemplate a little more carefully this idea that some medical breakthroughs go beyond individual patients and have broad societal implications and, potentially, civilization-changing impact.

We defined civilization-impacting innovation as that which has potential to alter the human experience, the fate of civilizations or to save 100’s of millions of lives. Such innovation has potential to extent average human life expectancy by a year or more, to create giant new industries or, alternatively, to massively change the human life experience.

Here is our list of what has come before us that we describe as civilization changing:

  1. Antibiotics and penicillin
  2. Birth control pill
  3. Discovery of DNA and RNA
  4. Gene editing
  5. mRNA vaccines
  6. Obesity drugs
  7. Vaccines (particularly Smallpox vaccine)

Here is our list of what is to come that we think could be civilization changing:

  1. Autophagy control and aging
  2. Bioelectronics
  3. Gene editing and agriculture
  4. Drugs for increasing insulin sensitivity
  5. Generative AI and precision medicine
  6. IPSCs and the brain
  7. Synthetic Biology
  8. Yamanaka factors and aging

Our past forecasts of what will matter have not always proven out and we don’t doubt that there is much that we are missing.

 

Summary

As those of us in the U.S. celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday in 2023, it’s clear we have much to be grateful for.

We are all part of an industry that had made a huge difference for humankind.

One of the most remarkable data points in this presentation is the persistent market outperformance of the biopharma sector dating back to 1930.

The confluence of rapid upcoming global growth and the history of what that has meant for pharmaceutical product consumption in the United States paints a bullish picture of what the biopharmaceutical can become in the decades ahead.

The demand side comes with a double dividend that many do not readily see. Pharma innovation means that, on average, humans will live longer. And, in turn, living longer triggers more demand for pharma products. This creates a positive feedback cycle that should continue to raise pharma spend as a share of GDP over time.

There is high potential for growth in spend on pharma products even in the U.S., where there is high pessimism about the IRA and poor reputation of the pharma industry today.

Add this to a period of extraordinary ongoing drug discovery linked to an increased understanding of genetics and biology and we are poised to see countless new innovations make their way to patients.

When coupled with the explosion of progress in our ability to efficiently develop and discover drugs across so many interesting modalities, we are likely to see a meaningful uptick in therapeutic options for patients in need.

We have argued herein that biologic innovation has been civilization changing for millennia and will continue to be for many more.

The opportunities to impact human civilization with upcoming innovation in biology is awe inspiring.

Buckle up and let’s go! We have an amazing bioscience century in front of us.

READ OUR REPORT

 
 
 

Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated | Member SIPC & NYSE | www.stifelib.com

 

 

 
Meet Stifel Institutional Investment Banking Capabilities Insights & Perspectives
Stifel Investment Banking: Focus. Excellence. Results. The power of our people and platform Find Us on Twitter Find Us on Linked In
 

 

 
This document is being sent to you for your information only as an investment banking client of Stifel and should not be forwarded outside of your organization. This document has been prepared by the Stifel investment banking division and is not a product of Stifel Research. This document should not be used as a basis for trading in the securities or loans of the companies named herein or for any other investment decision. Dollar volume represents full credit to each underwriter. All transaction announcements above appear as a matter of record only. This document does not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, the securities or loans of any of the companies named herein, or a solicitation of proxies or votes in connection with any shareholder meeting which may be held in connection with any of these announced transactions, and should not be construed as consisting of investment advice. Stifel does not provide accounting, tax, or legal advice. Stifel collectively refers to Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated and other affiliated broker-dealer subsidiaries of Stifel Financial Corp.
 

Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your email preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Copyright 2023 Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated. All rights reserved.


 

 
VIEW ONLINE