In the world of medtech innovation, investment and market access, commentators are seeing a maturing attitude to risk, more readiness to address workflows and greater awareness of being on the ball in a regulatory sense. Senior executives from consultancy firm Technology Commercialization Group (TCG) give In Vivo their take on what is behind these changes.

Our readers have been voting and the results have been counted. The winners of In Vivo's annual Deals Of The Year contest are...

Last year saw some serious early-stage funding, major later stage financings and more cash filtering into seed rounds. Follow the timeline of venture capital transactions throughout 2018 worth more than $100m. A record-breaking year for biotech financing. 

Bayer's novel 2016 joint venture with the venture capital group Versant Ventures has spawned something like a big pharma, new science start-up, with an open mandate to disrupt drug development through generous endowments in the scarce commodities of freedom, time and patience.

Recent excitement around exosomes underscores their potential to solve drug delivery challenges that have limited the power and applicability of the biopharma industry’s growing arsenal of therapeutic modalities. 

Digital transformation: it is the buzz phrase of the decade, and rightly so. We are living amidst a technology shift, a complete revolution of technology that in the next 10 to 15 years will change everything, in business as well as in our everyday lives. Peter Shone, chief technology officer at PAREXEL Informatics, shares his thoughts on how industry can be more proactive in clinical development using digital technologies.

Casebia Therapeutics, a three-year old start-up in the hotly contested gene therapy space, is the product of a remarkably relaxed joint venture between the German multinational giant Bayer and CRISPR Therapeutics, a leader in conducting the first clinical trial involving the CRISPR-Cas9 editing platform. 

An interactive look at recent executive-level company changes and promotions in the biopharma, medical device and diagnostics industries.

Luciano Rossetti, head of global research and development at Merck KGaA, believes the mid-sized pharma is well on its way to becoming a global immuno-oncology specialist. He discusses in-house innovation, the company’s recent IO alliance with GSK and the next wave of success that is beginning to swell across the cancer drug development community.

It is a world, at least the US corner of it, in which any common understanding of drug value is confused by opposing incentives – to opacity and transparency, to looking at benefit broadly or narrowly, long-term or short-term: value, in short, to whom?

In this In Vivo executive roundtable, an informal working group of biopharma leaders in market access reviews the current state of play with regulators, patients and payers. Contacts with the first two stakeholders are clear-eyed and surprisingly productive, but the payer remains the tie that grinds – an inscrutable partner of necessity in moving complex, costly innovations toward acceptance in the marketplace.  

Menacing clouds on the horizon, or opportunity for medtechs large and small in the evolving health care delivery ecosystems? Probably both, and a significant amount of risk, too, for those medtechs who push through the pain barrier to, in some cases, redefine their own roles. Helping patients understand the value being created will also be a major success factor for medtechs. Whatever the outcomes, these are exciting times, says ZS' Brian Chapman, in this future-gazing podcast with In Vivo.  

In a deal worth over $4bn, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck KGAA will develop M7824, which targets two immuno-suppressive pathways. Danaher paid $21.4bn for GE Healthcare's biopharma business. Biopharma funding was up while device financing decreased from the previous month.

As the margin for error in the drug launch cycle continues to erode, emerging biopharma companies face a growing urgency to double down on scaling up for their first launch.

Derived from Strategic Transactions, Informa’s premium source for tracking life sciences deal activity, the Dealmaking column is a survey of recent health care transactions listed by relevant industry segment – In Vitro Diagnostics, Medical Devices, and Pharmaceuticals – and then categorized by type – Acquisition, Alliance, or Financing. This month’s column covers deals announced March 2019.