76 TWENTYFOURSEVENBIOPHARMA Issue 1 / March 2025 CPHI REPORT As we head into the New Year, and with Pharmapack Europe (22/23 January, 2025) opening next month – a key window into pharma prospects, particularly for drug devices and packaging with an expected 6000 executives – we spoke to influential CPHI expert from this year’s CPHI Annual Report. Brian Scanlan, Operating Partner at Edgewater Capital, leads the venture capital company’s life sciences practice. At CPHI Milan, Scanlan outlined his view on the state of investment in the biopharma industry, key areas of interest for venture capitalists, and where the market is set to head going forward into 2025. A hawkish market Broadly speaking, Scanlan believes that the state of biopharma investment is a “mixed bag.” 2023 was an especially rough year for the biopharma market, and while funding has picked up to some degree since then, it’s still relatively shaky. Per Scanlan, venture firms are leaning toward safer bets due to a mix of perceived market volatility and limited investing capital. “Given the drop in the market over the last few years, investors have gotten more risk-averse,” said Scanlan. “If you think about where innovation hits within the pharmaceutical pipelines, the earlier phases of development tend to be more risky.... Investors have placed their bets more on the later clinical phases programs, those that have more data, [that are] more well established. And then also the therapeutic modalities that have more of a track record for success over decades, like small molecules, biologics, and subsets under biologics, like bispecific antibodies and ADCs.” According to Scanlan, both public and private funding in the past 12-to-18 months is being directed toward these “tried and true” therapeutics. From a CDMO or CRO perspective, those who are focused on the above therapeutic modalities, along with those in the clinical-to-commercial phases of manufacturing and development, are in a relatively stable position. Things aren’t as rosy for those in the earlier stages;
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