PureTech Health has amassed niche expertise and built a unique structure that allows it to develop technologies for unmet needs, in the separate but related areas of brain-immune-gut. And now, with the experienced ex-Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher as interim chair, PureTech can target a smooth path to its next growth stages in the “BIG Axis.” Senior executives Eric Elenko and Joep Muijrers reveal more about the focus and aims of the Boston, US group.

The Munich-based company is one of a handful of mature European biotechs poised to enter the big league. New CEO Jean-Paul Kress talks to In Vivo about the firm’s next generation antibody platform and why US expansion is crucial to its future.

In a recent Bain & Company survey, nearly 80% of health care executives said they needed to be more agile. Yet more than half said they were not familiar with formal agile methodologies and tools, and were not using them in their companies.

In the first half of 2019, life science companies raised $469m through series A rounds in Europe – a solid start to the year compared to the $686m companies raised in 2018 overall. Silicon Valley Bank expects the European sector to be in “rude health” for the next two to three years at least, when it comes to accessing VC cash.

As health care transitions to digitally enabled wellness, medtechs will be missing a trick if they persist in holding onto the delivery, business methods and models that were the standard of the early 2000s. Heightened expectations of the new options for dealing with personal health mean that new opportunities are there for the taking – but industry shouldn’t let the tech companies have it all their own way, advised ZS principal Brian Chapman.

The complexity of producing viable drug candidates is increasing as an abundance of new science keeps extending the range of possible targets and fragmenting disease subtypes. Proximity to novel exploratory research is a driver of pipeline productivity – so can physical location within a communal geography of well-resourced intellectual firepower raise the odds for R&D success? In Vivo sits down with eight key leaders in academia, VC, commercial real estate and groundbreaking biotech to discuss how Los Angeles – the “out there” city of out-sized ambitions – is positioning itself for global leadership in the curative technologies of the future.