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VOLUME 37 NUMBER 07 JULY/AUGUST 2019 Could The Gut Cure MedTech Forum 2019: How To Negotiate With Brain Disease? Building Growth In The Outcomes Era Public Payers PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK invivo.pharmaintelligence.informa.com STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR LIFE SCIENCES DECISION-MAKERS CONTENTS ❚ July/August 2019 10 COVER ❚ Building The Biotech City: Is Los Angeles The Go-To Hub For Tomorrow’s Drug Innovations? William Looney The complexity of producing viable drug candidates is increasing as an abundance of new science keeps extending the range of possible targets and fragmenting disease subtypes. Proximity to novel exploratory research is a driver of pipeline productivity – so can physical location within a communal geography of well-resourced intellectual firepower raise the odds for R&D success? 20 36 Could The Gut Cure How To Negotiate With Brain Disease? Public Payers MELANIE SENIOR WILLIAM LOONEY Scientists now understand that there are In Vivo speaks to the UK branded multiple, bi-directional links between gut industry’s negotiator for the latest and brain. They are using this knowledge five-year joint pricing pact with the to develop new treatments for some of the government, Richard Torbett, who most challenging chronic conditions, outlines, among other topics, five including Alzheimer’s disease, widely applicable precedents from the Parkinson’s disease and obesity. talks that can work in “getting to yes” – despite the fractious budgetary 32 climate for health care evident in all major country markets. MedTech Forum 2019: Building 26 Growth In The Outcomes Era A New Definition: The EU ASHLEY YEO Answer To Medicines Shortages? The European MedTech Forum’s CEO IAN SCHOFIELD panel set out to address high-level global, What is a medicines shortage? The answer long-range issues, but from the start it may seem obvious, but the fact that got log jammed in regulatory issues. European regulators have only now come Not in the script perhaps, but wholly up with a commonly agreed definition understandable, as new EU regulations suggests otherwise. will have huge strategic importance for how companies do business – and in the case of start-ups, if they can continue to do business. ©2016 Informa Business Information, Inc., an Informa company July/August 2019 | In Vivo | 1 ❚ CONTENTS July/August 2019 DEPARTMENTS ❚ From The Editor AROUND THE INDUSTRY Summer 2019 started with a deal-making boom for 4 MedTech Forum 2019: the biopharma sector. In June, AbbVie announced Consumers And Wellness, it would acquire Botox developer Allergan for Or Patients And Health Care? $63bn. AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez said repeat- ASHLEY YEO edly when describing the company's rationale for buying Allergan that very little value was ascribed 6 European SPC Manufacturing to the latter’s research and development pipeline. Waiver Comes Into Effect However, the pharmaceutical firms combined have DAVID WALLACE 62 drugs in clinical development – with 38 in Phase II and III or awaiting regulatory approvals, includ- ing new indications for marketed products – re- 42 ON THE MOVE quiring substantial ongoing investment. Recent executive appointments LUCIE ELLIS Elsewhere, Gilead Sciences has agreed to a new in the life sciences industry deal worth $5.05bn with existing partner Galapa- REGINA PALESKI gos, which will see the US firm increase its stake in the Belgian biotech. Gilead will pay $3.95bn in cash and $1.1bn for an equity investment, plus additional milestones and royalties. The deal gives Gilead access to six clinical compounds, 46 DEAL-MAKING including GLPG1690, which is in Phase III for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis Deals Shaping The Medical Industry, (IPF), GLPG1972 in Phase IIb for osteoarthritis and more than 20 preclinical pro- July 2019 grams as well as Galapagos’ drug discovery platform. It also gains an exclusive THE STRATEGIC TRANSACTIONS TEAM option to develop and commercialize all the products outside Europe. In June, we also saw Pfizer pay $11.4bn to purchase Array BioPharma for its re- cently approved Braftovi/Mektovi drug combination and pipeline of targeted cancer therapies. EXCLUSIVE ONLINE CONTENT In a recent exclusive interview with In Vivo, which will be published in August, invivo.pharmaintelligence.informa.com biotech CEO and UK Bioindustry Association board member Charlotte Case- bourne commented on this trend of buying innovation. She said: “It is evident ❚ What Does It Take To Launch And that over the last five years major pharma companies have increasingly out- Lead An Oncology Biotech Today? sourced their R&D activities. An example here would be Gilead; most of their LUCIE ELLIS lead products are the result of licensing deals.” “Where companies are doing well in terms of having fresh pipelines, a lot of those products are coming from licensing deals and acquisitions. It shows how ❚ MedTech Forum 2019: the different stakeholders within the R&D sector are capitalizing on what they In The Medtech Glasshouse, are good at. For some of the bigger players, that might not necessarily be doing Industry Need Not Fear Stones innovative R&D in-house,” she added. Casebourne is CEO of emerging oncology ASHLEY YEO biotech, Theolytics. Details about other recent alliances and acquisitions can be found at the back of this month’s issue in our regular “Deals Shaping The Medical Industry” column. ❚ MedTech Forum 2019: The Future Is Here But Industry Still Needs A Long-Term Vision ASHLEY YEO In Vivo: Always Online First Don’t have an online user account? Quickly and easily create one Relevant and exclusive online-only by clicking on the “Create your content at your fingertips 24/7. ❚ Deals In Depth, May 2019 account” link at the top of the page. AMANDA MICKLUS Full access to our 36-year archive. Contact: Access your subscription by visiting: [email protected] invivo.pharmaintelligence.informa. or call: (888) 670-8900 or +1 (908) com and log in. 748-1221 for additional information. All stock images in this publication courtesy of /invivo @invivo /invivo www.shutterstock.com unless otherwise stated. 2 | | July/August 2019 invivo.pharmamedtechbi.com In Vivo invivo.pharmaintelligence.informa.com invivo.pharmaintelligence.informa.com CONTENTS ❚ ❚ Up-Front SNAPSHOTS FROM JULY/AUGUST’S CONTENT “A larger issue is changing the cultural mind-set, by tackling up-front the myths that others in biopharma seem to have about Los Angeles. For example, I still hear from outsiders that it’s hard to recruit talent. That’s the mantra. I just smile and try to ignore it. It might have been true.” PAGE 10 The “gut-brain axis” is the focus of growing numbers The possibility of shortages in a of researchers, biotech no-deal Brexit scenario is a real companies and investors. worry, and the UK government has They are uncovering produced a number of documents multiple two-way advising pharmaceutical companies communication pathways on what to do to mitigate the risk, between belly and brain, including building up an additional spanning neural, six weeks of stock over and above hormonal and immune- normal levels. system signalling. PAGE 20 PAGE 26 A distinguishing feature of the UK biopharma landscape is the structured and predictable approach to managing the cost of medicines. There has been Future medtech CEOs a voluntary arrangement to secure this will have different objective since 1957. However, as values, digital nativity globalization of supply chains and trade liberalization took hold, such an and the ability to think explicit connection between pricing agile and find creative and profits became harder to solutions to issues. implement. PAGE 36 PAGE 32 ©2016 Informa Business Information, Inc., an Informa company July/August 2019 | In Vivo | 3 ❚ Around The Industry MedTech Forum 2019: Consumers And Wellness, Or Patients And Health Care? As health care transitions to digitally enabled wellness, medtechs will be missing a of lobby groups such as the International trick if they persist in holding onto the delivery, business methods and models that Consortium of Investigative Journalists were the standard of the early 2000s. Heightened expectations of the new options (ICIJ), whose actions last year quickened for dealing with personal health mean that new opportunities are there for the taking medtech’s heartbeat – if only for a brief – but industry shouldn’t let the tech companies have it all their own way, advised ZS moment. The ICIJ’s weakly assembled principal Brian Chapman. research did not get the traction its archi- tects evidently were seeking, other than The MedTech Forum, Medtech Europe’s It is perhaps sobering to discover that, some one-off story themes in a few, albeit annual conference, was uprooted for the regarding digital, industry players are still upstream, European dailies. It had been first time in its history, shifting from Brus- trying to define it and are all grappling with anticipated that ICIJ representatives would sels to Paris for 2019. The change of loca- its implications in health care. And this have a big presence at MTF 2019, just as tion worked well: by tacking the already goes right to the top of organizations and they had at medtech regulatory meetings populous event onto the back of the French to the forefront of leadership. One of the in Brussels last fall. But if they did send any industry’s annual start-ups forum (Start-up issues to factor in is, how does medtech delegates, no one noticed. innovantes du dispostif médical or Snitem), stay true to privacy and data protection attendee numbers swelled nicely. standards, with digital, that are well above ICIJ INITIATIVE – NOT A TOTAL And the French delegates offered traditional levels, and yet not act so conser- MISSED OPPORTUNITY fresh ideas on innovation and uptake, vatively at this time of change that it risks Their media investigations in 2018 made and especially on digital innovation, as losing the opportunity ahead? more impact in Europe than in the US, the health care and medtech worlds turn Exploiting it properly will probably call where the Bleeding Edge Netflix docu- – albeit slowly – to face the new realities for new talent – which is arriving – and the mentary was aired, Chapman observed.
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