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Public biotech in 2017—the numbers

Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 576–584 (2018)Cite this article

Last year, investors scrambled to invest in newly floated biotechs. This, together with a brisk licensing market and policy tailwinds, helped boost the sector, even as an expected M&A boom was late to materialize.

And that's despite a somewhat rocky start. At the time, US President Donald Trump's January 2017 remark that drug companies were “getting away with murder,” in part because the government, through its Medicare program, wasn't negotiating down the prices of drugs, sent shivers through the sector (and caused an immediate 3% slide in the NASDAQ Biotech Index). But over the course of 2017, biotech industry watchers learned to interpret the utterances of an unpredictable US president. Biopharma valuations didn't budge when Trump said, in May 2018, that drug companies would soon announce “voluntary, massive drops in prices.” And the Trump administration's eventual plan to address drug prices, bullet-pointed by Trump alongside ex-Eli Lilly executive and current US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar earlier that month, largely eschews the kind of nuclear-option negotiation that Trump once appeared to embrace. Meanwhile, the US tax reform that became law in December 2017 slashed the corporate tax rate and included tax-based incentives for US-based companies to repatriate cash held abroad, making elite richer companies even richer. Analysts predicted that extra capital would reinvigorate what was—despite a few blockbuster highlights—a relatively moribund biopharma mergers and acquisitions (M&A) scene in 2017. Biotech investors responded with an influx of capital.

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Figure 1: NASDAQ biotech index over time.
Figure 2: Public biotech barometers.
Figure 3: IPO activity since 2004 showing amount raised ($ millions) and number of companies floated.
Figure 4: Global biotech industry financing over the past five years.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chris Morrison is a freelance writer based in Yardley, Pennsylvania, USA,

    Chris Morrison

  2. Riku Lahteenmaki is a freelance writer working in Turku, Finland.,

    Riku Lähteenmäki

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  1. Chris Morrison
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  2. Riku Lähteenmäki
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Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

List of publicly traded biotechs (XLS 226 kb)

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Morrison, C., Lähteenmäki, R. Public biotech in 2017—the numbers. Nat Biotechnol 36, 576–584 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4175

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