The biotech mood at the halfway mark of 2018? Bois­ter­ous, fo­cus­ing more at­ten­tion on Chi­na and look­ing for ac­cel­er­at­ed progress

Our End­points 100 group is in a feisty mood here in the sum­mer of 2018.

We asked for their views on some of the biggest head­lines in health­care, and came away with some clear im­pres­sions on how in­dus­try ex­ecs view the lat­est de­vel­op­ments on drug prices, FDA su­per­vi­sion of drug de­vel­op­ment and ap­provals and their com­pa­ny poli­cies re­lat­ed to the con­tro­ver­sial “right-to-try” leg­is­la­tion. We al­so tracked opin­ions on the ex­plo­sion of biotech growth in Chi­na and, as al­ways, mon­i­tored opin­ions on key fi­nan­cial and hir­ing trends for the in­dus­try that af­fect every­one.

We even asked for a re­port card on End­points News con­tent at our sec­ond an­niver­sary. And while we en­joyed some high marks, if you think this crowd was go­ing to let us off with­out a few sharp cri­tiques, well, you don’t know the End­points 100. The one com­mon trait you can ap­ply to all biotech ex­ecs is that they are in­tel­li­gent, ex­treme­ly well ed­u­cat­ed and un­afraid to voice an opin­ion. That goes dou­ble for this group.

Let’s start with their thoughts on the re­cent round of vows by Big Phar­ma to swear off price in­creas­es through the end of the year, which start­ed with a re­ver­sal by Pfiz­er and swift­ly be­came an in­dus­try stan­dard at most of the big play­ers in the in­dus­try.

The drug price freeze may be a cyn­i­cal dodge, but over­all change is com­ing

We gave the 100-plus in our group — with 82 re­spons­es — a chance to score this as a sim­ple dodge by phar­ma to es­cape crit­i­cism, a mean­ing­ful turn­ing point in the in­dus­try or some “oth­er” po­si­tion they could ex­plain.

A slight ma­jor­i­ty, 52%, con­clud­ed it was a sim­ple dodge. An­oth­er 28%, though, see a sig­nif­i­cant in­flec­tion point for bio­phar­ma that shouldn’t be missed. And 20% were some­where else in the mix.

Here’s a sam­pling of opin­ions, which re­flect a more nu­anced col­lec­tion of their thoughts than the sim­ple per­cent­ages may im­ply:

I hate Trump as our Pres­i­dent for MANY rea­sons, but the ac­tions he/Alex Azar are tak­ing will like­ly re­sult in fun­da­men­tal and fa­vor­able changes to bio­phar­ma pric­ing go­ing for­ward. We’re head­ing to­ward a re­bate-less world, which could ac­tu­al­ly cre­ate greater sus­tain­abil­i­ty for in­no­va­tion and need­ed re­wards to at­tract cap­i­tal go­ing for­ward. — Anony­mous

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