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Public biotech 2018—the numbers

Nature Biotechnology volume 37, pages 714–721 (2019)Cite this article

Public companies continued to ride the crest of the wave of financing, licensing deals and regulatory approvals, but clouds may be looming on the horizon for the biggest biotech players. Chris Morrison and Riku Lähteenmäki report.

2018 was a banner year for biotech. Public market fundraising reached its zenith, with an increasingly global mix of initial public offerings (IPOs) and follow-on offerings adding nearly $36 billion to the biotech industry’s coffers (Box 1 and Supplementary Table 1). Licensing pacts contributed $10 billion in up-front cash to the sector’s innovation engines, with milestone payment totals promising many multiples of that collective down payment. Acquisitions of biotechs with near- or on-market assets jumped after a sluggish 2017, as commercial-stage companies again hunted for new medicines to move the revenue needle. Meanwhile, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broke records for drug approvals, including the number of approvals not requiring efficacy data from large phase 3 trials: an astonishing 59 new molecular entities received the regulator’s nod, including 20 biologics and 34 drugs that received Orphan Drug designation. Biotech companies were responsible for getting 29 of those new medicines across the FDA finish line, and were the original developers of many of the others that were carried across by larger pharmaceutical companies.

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Fig. 1: Public biotech barometers.
Fig. 2: IPOs.
Fig. 3: Global biotech financing.
Fig. 4: NASDAQ biotech index over time.

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  1. Yardley, Pennsylvania, USA

    Chris Morrison

  2. Turku, Finland

    Riku Lähteenmäki

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  1. Chris Morrison
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  2. Riku Lähteenmäki
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Correspondence to Chris Morrison.

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Morrison, C., Lähteenmäki, R. Public biotech 2018—the numbers. Nat Biotechnol 37, 714–721 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0170-7

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