Doubling survival in pancreatic cancer, a long-fought rare disease approval, a massive IPO and ambitious biotech entrepreneurs have BioSpace Senior Editor Annalee Armstrong feeling upbeat about the biotech scene.
Does it feel a little weird to be reading so much good biotech news lately? Trust me, from the other side—the writer’s—it certainly does.
As I write this, I’m in Chicago, on my way home from spending three days in Salt Lake City. There I immersed myself in the local biotech scene, and if you were wondering—yes, there is indeed a biotech scene there. A vibrant one. I’ll talk more about that in a second.
This SLC visit came as I began to see a noticeable shift in sentiment across biotech. For me, the trend crystalized with the announcement that Revolution Medicines had doubled survival in advanced pancreatic cancer—one of oncology’s final frontiers and most intractable foes.
Finally, a biotech had broken through this tough disease that has a five-year survival rate from diagnosis of about 13%.
Thisnews followed the long-awaited approval in March of Denali Therapeutics’ Hunter syndrome drug, now to be known as Avlayah. This rare disease strikes boys at around age two or three and slowly robs them of their brain function. I can hardly imagine anything worse for a parent. Avlayah is the first drug approved for the condition in 20 years—and the first to directly address its neurological symptoms.
RevMed, Denali. This is what biotech does best. What everyone wants this industry to be. Improving survival, improving lives. Finding new, better medicines.
Then, on the business side, Kailera Therapeutics announced a massive IPO. The industry held its collective breath. Would the barely two-year-old biotech beat Moderna’s $600 billion record from 2018?
Well, on Friday, we found out: Kailera set a new standard with a $625 million debut.
What excites me about this is not that a bunch of investors got to cash in. It’s that they are now likely to recycle that money back into the market. To fund the next RevMed, Denali or Kailera. While I see investment shifting outside the sector, I hope these investors are galvanized by this moment in biotech to re-invest.
And that brings me back to Salt Lake City, where I toured the biotech accelerator Altitude Labs, which was launched by AI drug discovery techbio company Recursion. At Altitude, I met young biotech entrepreneurs who are launching their ideas into actionable companies. I got to see how the approval of Avlayah personally impacted CEO Ryan Watts and how proud the Utah biotech community is of the milestone.
Across the street at a tour of Recursion’s labs, I sat in on an all-hands meeting where staff got to hear about the true impacts on a family of the incredibly difficult disease called familial adenomatous polyposis. The inherited disorder causes noncancerous polyps to grow in the colon and rectum as early as the teenage years. While patients can live with the disorder, they often face early cancers and immense, life-altering complications.
I know that the market hasn’t fully recovered from its post-pandemic slump. Biotechs still have regulatory uncertainty to contend with, a policy environment that changes from one day to the next and the need to compete for investors with the big shiny mystery box that is AI.
But after a year of keeping its head down and riding out the bumps, biotech is doing what it’s best at again. Innovating. Making things better.
I can’t wait to report more good news.
