By Gregory Mannix, Vice President International Business Development, LSN

LSN’s journey to spread the word about the first RESI conference in Europe, taking place on March 25^th in Vienna has been a great success. With three Fundraising Boot Camps in France and Sweden, followed by one in Denmark tomorrow, it has been an exciting week! The reception of these boot camps has been amazing, with high attendance and a lot of good interaction with the companies.

The workshop emphasized the need to look beyond regional resources, and tap in to the global ecosystem of investors and strategic partners. Of course there are a myriad of challenges to overcome to successfully enter the global stage.  It can be difficult, but necessary, to break out beyond normal protocol and be more aggressive in outreach to investors. It is important to remember that a fundraising executive has to go and actively chase the opportunities, they are not simply waiting to be caught.

The race to find funding can be a long journey, and companies should not expect it to last only six months. The entire process generally takes from 9-18 months – it’s a full-time commitment that involves more than just going to a conference or two a year.  This is why the RESI conference series is such a powerful tool – with the ability to attend up to five conferences a year, it is a great way to build and maintain relationships with investors and strategic partners.

Last, but not least, Boot Camp attendees learned that it’s never too early to start fundraising they want you on their radar screens. Fundraising is ultimately a numbers game, and meeting with investors sooner rather than later can help you hone your message and get an idea of what issues you may need to address to fully capture an investor’s interest, and, hopefully, to secure their funding.

We will be continuing this journey, with a boot camp in Spain at the University of Barcelona Science Park next week. This will be followed by three boot camps in Israel, taking place in Ra’anana at Sanara Ventures, in Haifa at MindUP and in Nazareth at NGT³. The following week, we will be back in Europe with boot camps in Heidelberg at BioRN, in Basel and in Brussels. For more information on the boot camps in Israel, please reach out to Karen Deyo at k.deyo@lifesciencenation.com and for more information on the boot camps in Europe, please reach out to George Kamphaus at g.kamphaus@lifesciencenation.com.

 

 

 

 

By Karen Deyo, Investor Research Analyst, LSN

LSN’s first RESI in Europe is rapidly approaching and Early Bird pricing ends on February 8^th! With Partnering launching on the 25^th, take a sneak peek at some of the investors coming to RESI. Don’t forget to register to have the opportunity to meet with some of these investors one-on-one! Do you want added exposure? Apply to the Innovation Challenge, where you could be selected to present a poster in the exhibition hall at RESI, with additional exposure in the LSN Newsletter and the RESI Program Guide. The application deadline is February 20^th!

We hope to see you in Vienna on March 25^th!

 

By Lucy Parkinson, VP of Investor Research, LSN

While raising early stage capital is vital to a life science startup’s journey from the bench to the bedside, it’s also important for entrepreneurs to make connections with potential strategic partners.  Big pharma licensing and M&A is the ultimate exit strategy for most biotech startups, and in taking an in-depth look at 2018’s licensing deals, LSN found that the major pharmas are looking earlier than ever for promising new assets.

In addition to curating the LSN Investor Platform and organizing the RESI Conference series, LSN also provides the LSN Company and Licensing Deals platforms, which provide information on life science activity all over the world.  Our Licensing Deals data includes any deal announced that includes a financial metric (such as an up-front or milestone payment).  Therefore it doesn’t capture deals that are announced with no financial specifics, but it does provide a broad overview of current activity in the pharma dealmaking space.

So what happened in 2018?  The most stark point is that many deals were made very, very early.

In reading the notes attached to these deals, one often sees the words ‘Drug discovery platform,’ followed by descriptions of cutting edge technologies.  By contrast, very few deals mention ‘drug delivery’, which in past years was a major topic in pharma licensing.

The effect of this high level of interest in novel drug discovry platforms is that a large proportion of 2018’s deals took place at a research or preclinical stage – in total, 60% of the deals we tracked involved assets that had yet to enter human clinical trials.  Many biotech entrepreneurs underestimate the importance of targeting a pharma partnership – some believe their asset is too early stage, but many are held back by the belief that the only reason a big pharma company would be talking to an early stage startup is because the pharma company wants to steal their ideas.  While it’s important to have strong IP protection, the data makes clear that the reason pharma wants to talk to you early is because they are increasingly inking deals early – deals which benefit everyone involved.

In terms of indication, oncology remains the largest area of dealmaking, but CNS assets also provided a significant number of deals, as did metabolic diseases and dermatology.

One trend that continues to hold is that deals are now rarely about me-too technologies; instead, almost every deal represents a new cutting edge.  Undiscovered targets in the microbiome.  Protein degradation drug candidates.  Tumor-specific targets.  Gene therapy.  Major themes in new biotechnologies are finally flowering at the deal stage – precision medicine, -omics, synthetic biology, cell therapies, CRISPR.  With global pharmaceutical companies bringing these technologies into their pipelines, we hope that new treatments will not be far away.