Despite a couple of notable ‘firsts’ for European public biotech financing, biotech’s COVID-19 bubble may be about to burst. Virus fears pushed both private and public investors toward biotech, but vaccination successes have changed the sentiment. Now, it seems there are simply too many biotech companies, especially in Europe.
Medicines for rare and paediatric diseases have been successfully enabled through the EU’s incentives framework. The number of medicines in development has risen significantly since the introduction of the legislation (3,678 applications for orphan designation by end 2020).
The past two years could be called the years of messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, with two major biotech companies, BioNTech and Moderna, playing a crucial role in the development of vaccines against COVID-19 and showing the world the way out of the pandemic, along with achieving record sales revenues.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how vulnerable human beings and societies are to a new infectious disease, and how important the life science industry is to come up with diagnostic and therapeutic solutions.
New entrants and variants will be main drivers of the COVID-19 vaccine market as supply gradually begins
to catch up with demand.
The Commission study on Novel Genomic Techniques (NGTs) underlines that plants resulting from NGTs have the potential to contribute to a more sustainable food system and support the objectives of the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy. At the same time, the study finds that the current GMO legislation, adopted in 2001, is not fit for purpose for these innovative technologies.
IP U.S. reverses stance, backs giving poorer countries access to COVID vaccine patents:
President Joe Biden in May threw his support behind waiving intellectual property rights
for COVID-19 vaccines – very much to the surprise of the biotech world.
European biotechs have been longly undervalued. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of them took off. They will have to prove their value in a post-COVID era. However, Europe is there.
Hague Court of Appeal (CoA) sets Dutch approach to the doctrine equivalence reversing District Court, handing Eli Lilly another win in its pan-European battle over infringement of its pemetrexed patents and bringing it in line with approaches taken elsewhere in Europe like in Germany and in the UK.
Women make up half of the world’s population. Finally, pharma companies and invetors are now beginning to pay more attention to female diseases.