2023 pharma trends Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

Digital dreams and realities clash pharma and biotech in 2023

[Adobe Stock]

The tale of digital pharma and biotech in 2023 is one of two realities. In one corner, you have AI and digital-focused startups and sometimes executives at Big Pharma companies with grand AI ambitions proclaiming the power of the technology. But on the other side of the pharma-AI coin is a more cautious crowd. Here, industry veterans and pragmatic managers wrestle with the realities of integrating AI into the tightly regulated and often legacy infrastructure that has guided drug development for decades.

Ambitious plans versus on-the-ground realities

It is true that the vast majority of pharma and biotech companies are working on crafting a strategy for AI tools. Only 1% of the participants in CRB’s Horizons Life Sciences 2023 report said they did not have such a strategy. Three-quarters, 76%, said such a strategy would be implemented within the next two years while 21% said they planned on doing so…

10 major pharma and biotech companies that downsized in 2023

#layoffs_chart { width: 900px; height: 700px; } #layoffs_chart { width: 900px; height: 700px; } // Load the Visualization API and the corechart package. google.charts.load('current', {'packages':['corechart']}); // Set a callback to run when the Google Visualization API is loaded. google.charts.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart); function drawChart() { // Create the data table for the bar chart. var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([ ['Company', 'Layoffs', { role: 'style' }, { type: 'string', role: 'annotation' }], ['Grifols', 2300, '#440154', null], ['Takeda', 1586, '#482878', null], ['Thermo Fisher Scientific', 1275, '#3B528B', null], ['Genentech', 1019, '#31688E', null], ['Biogen', 1000, '#26828E', null], ['Catalent', 760, '#1F9E89', null], ['Amgen', 750, '#35B779', null], ['Novavax', 500, '#6DCD59', null], ['Emergent Biosolutions', …

Do rising interest rates actually fuel pharma M&A? Sometimes, yes

[Andrey Popov/Adobe Stock]

Conventional wisdom holds that rising interest rates curb M&A activity, but an analysis of the pharma and biotech M&A data from 2018 to early October 2023 reveals a counterintuitive trend — at least over the short term.

As interest rates have risen in 2023, pharma deal-making has remained strong although the deal size has dipped. As rates surpassed 2.4% from September 2022 onwards, deal activity jumped to an average of roughly 6 deals per month. For context, when interest rates ranged from 1.4% to 2.4% from 2018 to 2019, the industry averaged roughly 2 deals per month. While there was a relative increase in M&A volume during the historically low-interest period of 2020 to August 2022 when rates dropped to as low as 0.05%, the average number of deals per month then — 3.3 — is still markedly lower than recent levels.

One possibility is that higher interest rates are s…