The future trend of gene therapy into the clinic will not change.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Northern Light Ventures” (ID :NorthernLightVC) Author Northern Light, authorized to reprint.
“Now there is a bit of capital difficulty, or some industries are in the middle of not finding the North. But the investment in medical and health fields is still quite hot, and gene therapy, immunotherapy, and tumor immunity have been hot in the past year or two, and Still moving up.” In the recent “Lighting 2019 Frontier Biotechnology”, Deng Feng, founder and managing director of Northern Light Ventures, mentioned in his opening speech.
Aurora Borealis is an offline theme event for Northern Light Ventures. A major theme this year is cutting-edge biotechnology, which focuses on the future direction of tumor immunity and gene therapy.
In Deng Feng’s view, biotechnology is so hot, there are three main reasons. The first is that science and technology have made great progress, and the new biotechnology will continue to heat up from now to the future. The second is the continuous optimization of talent and industrial systems. There are more CROs in China, but there is still a lack of development in the production process, especially in the sub-area of biological genes and immunity. In the past two years, the talent situation has been continuously improved. Whether it is returnees or local talents, they are moving forward quickly. However, talents in the direction of biotechnology are still in short supply. As long as there are sufficient talents in this area, their valuations tend to be high. The third is policy support innovation, the introduction of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the science and technology board and some new policies have broadened the exit channel for industry investment, so investors’ investment enthusiasm in this area has also greatly improved.
Gene therapy faces an ups and downs within three to five years and enters a clinical trend
Chelid Da, founder of the Sherpa Fund, believes that although gene therapy is currently hot, there will be an ups and downs in the next three to five years. Technically, gene therapy has great potential in the future, and it can be called a third-generation treatment or a key component of third-generation drugs. The reason for the rapid growth in the valuation of companies studying gene therapy in foreign countries over the past two years is not that they are truly profitable, but that they have a high return on investment in the future. In addition, there is another reason that large pharmaceutical companies are desperately laying out because they are afraid that they are falling behind in this direction, so they have to quickly fill this piece of capacity.
In China,