Bio-Europe 2012, figures and feelings from Amsterdam

A few days ago I attended Bio-Europe Spring. The spring was shining in Amsterdam and the city was beautiful and welcoming as always. The meeting was intense: 2,157 attendees from 1,304 companies participated in 11,172 one-to-one meetings and we could chose between 135 company presentations.

The industry atmosphere was showing clear signs of improvement and a few companies as Almirall were jubilant by the recent FDA approval of its aclidinium bromide for COPD Treatment. 26 companies and entities from Catalonia were there, making up 57% of the total Spanish representation at BES 2012.

Of special interest were the Opening Remarks by David Thomas that were covering three main topics: Public market performance in the US vs other sectors, Private funding environment and Drug pipeline deal volume (see here its slides). The public performance of the 300 public US biotech was in 2011 clearly outstanding with an averaged +12% compared with the -25% of the median of the rest of sectors. In the current year the trend is still better for biotechs and, more interesting for European eyes, the public investors are more focused on small early stage companies (53% of the investments were done on companies with less than 100M USD of MarketCap and 48% on companies on early stage). This should be a good couple of bullet points for those in Europe that are skeptic about the sector.

In the side of the Funding environment the more striking figure was the 32% forecast of increase of investment on orphan diseases, here the prospects of small companies to retain value is higher.
Finally, David presented the figures of deals with upfronts bigger than 10M USD before and after the crisis. The overall number has decreased from 165 in the period 2006-2007 to 114 in the 2010-2011, here I guess the mergers in the big companies could have play an additional role to the global economic slowdown. But, interestingly, if we analyze the data we see that the early deals (PC and Phase I) are still robust (24% in the period 2006-2007 for 25% in the 2010-2011). If we consider only the PC deals the average is 37% in both periods. So there is room, as always, for companies with early assets to get fruitful deals. It was a great meeting and it is a fantastic sector.