Hello Tri-I Community! 

The Tri-institutional startup venture group (SVG) is excited to announce its second edition of the Life Sciences & the Street Newsletter! This month's newsletter discusses the implications of the upcoming "Patent Cliff", exciting research at the Longevity-focused company Altos Labs, venture creation at Flagship Pioneering (APPLY for their Fellowship by 1/31), and other news about major players in the life sciences market. This writing is designed to educate its audience about the current financial and investment trends in the life sciences, interesting products and companies that one should keep an eye out for, and emerging funds that have exciting potential. This edition of the Life Sciences & the Street Newsletter was written by Luc Ghaleb and Janki Shah. Disclaimer: This newsletter is not providing investment advice!

We are expanding our newsletter team! If you are interested in joining to write the next Life Sciences & the Street Newsletter, please reach out to Janki (jas2775@med.cornell.edu), Luc (lrg4003@med.cornell.edu), and Nick (nib4003@med.cornell.edu) on the SVG slack (sign up here) or by email. We will have a meeting in February to discuss roles for everyone interested. You can also find us on Twitter (@StartupWCM) and at our website.

Sincerely,

Nick Bartelo
President, Startup Venture Group
PhD Candidate
Weill Cornell Medicine

Does the Upcoming “Patent Cliff” Offer a Fertile Ground for Dealmaking in Biopharma?

Nearly 200 drugs will lose patent protection by the end of the decade, also known as the “patent cliff”. Among these are blockbuster drugs such as Merck & Co.’s Keytruda, Regeneron’s Eylea, J&J’s Stelara, and Eli Lilly’s Trulicity. The biopharma industry is at risk of losing $44.4 billion in sales this year with a total of $236 billion in pharma sales at risk between now and 2030. Against this looming threat, experts are envisioning an opportunity for dealmaking as pharma companies chase opportunities to increase growth, especially large biotech companies that desire to beef up their pipeline through strategic alliances

According to the EY M&A Firepower report, oncology and rare diseases has dominated the M&A activity in the last year in both value and volume. M&A activity in oncology reached $65.2 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow. Against the extremely competitive market, biopharma companies have paid large premiums, with multiples for oncology acquisitions averaging 11.9 times total target company revenues over the past decade. Another area biopharma companies have their eye on is GLP-1 drugs. The success of these drugs in the past year, accompanied by new entrants will fuel the M&A activity in 2024. Increased demand for M&A activity might trigger soaring premiums for these partnerships. For example, Pfizer acquired Seagen for $43 billion in March 2023, which was a 33% premium over its share price and Merck paid $200 per share for Prometheus in April 2023, which was a 75% premium over its share price. 

According to IQVIA’s Biopharma Outlook for 2024 report, the aggregate deal value in biopharma was up by 79% in 2023 over 2022 and is expected to increase in 2024 (Figure 1). The report also stated that there’s $1.37 trillion in dealmaking capacity in the biopharma industry. There’s already evidence of M&A activity picking up as more than $6.4 billion worth of deals were announced on Monday, January 8, 2024 by big-time players Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Boston Scientific. 

A Company That You Should Know About 
Altos Labs is a biotechnology company based in Los Altos, California that has a simple, but incredibly ambitious goal, to halt or reverse the human aging process. This company, which is still private, started in 2022 and has raised over $3 billion (as of 2022) from a variety of investors including Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder. Their work is based upon harnessing the power of cellular rejuvenation by understanding how to reprogram cells to combat diseases, injuries, and disabilities that can occur throughout life. 

The science of this company stems from work done by Japanese scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Shinya Yamanaka. His work showed that differentiated cells, regardless of age, can be reprogrammed to erase two epigenetic properties: cell identity and age. This breakthrough was built upon by Altos’s founding scientist, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who found that cells could be partially reprogrammed to a state that is resilient to stressors without losing their identity or enhanced functions that are seen in young cells. 

Altos Labs is just a player in a field of many others. The longevity industry, while young in its nature, has been witness to an influx of investment and research. Rather than following a conventional disease-focused paradigm of the life science industry, the longevity industry seeks to address the bodily and mental decay that serve as the root causes of aging. In a piece penned by Deloitte, the longevity industry has led to the development of an ecosystem that comprises of nine parts: nanotech, AI-based diagnostics, wearables and robotics, age-tech, age-reversal, wellness and prevention, cell and gene therapy, aging therapeutics, and research into the hallmarks of aging. While the path taken by the industry has been uneven, with financing and interest waning from time to time, there is hope that the thaw of the recent biotech winter will help longevity bloom.