J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
Between January 8 and 11, GBT attended the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, California.
Montevideo, Uruguay, January 12, 2018. Between January 8 and 11, GBT attended the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, California. The team sat with plenty of companies throughout the healthcare conference, with most of them signaling the constructive fundamentals expected for 2018. Management spoke about the positive drivers on pricing, macro trends and important saving coming from tax reforms. There was some concern regarding some large companies entering into healthcare arena and the need for current incumbents to build scale through consolidation, more control of the continuum of care through vertical integration or joint ventures and alliances. On the positive note, there was a significant surge in FDA approvals and increasing interest into acquisition of assets with revenue in key therapeutic areas, such as oncology, immune system disorders, rare diseases and specialty medicine.
The consensus around J.P. Morgan Conference was that the last 12 months represented a breakout year for the biotechnology industry. With major clinical successes in areas such as CAR-T, gene therapy, immune-oncology, cell therapy and gene editing, many see 2017 as the year that biotech really came of age. As the investors, analysts, executives and consultants headed home there was a general consensus that 2018 was going to continue the positive momentum of the last couple of months.
Companies are also focusing on developing the team of excellent scientists working in many therapeutic fields and technologies. In the recent years, there has been an increase in the number of approvals for first-in-class drugs. This reflects the impact of advanced drug discovery technologies and approaches. Drug discovery service providers are also focusing on sequencing of the human genome in order to open the way to genomics-based methods in drug discovery. Innovation currently seen in the drug discovery methods is based on more information about targets, disease phenotypes, and compounds.