Biotech was big in 2019, but here's one record no one want­ed to see bro­ken: Most bank­rupt­cies

With so much mon­ey and so many promis­es in biotech, some­thing’s got to go bust. And in 2019, a lot did.

Al­though last year saw the sec­ond-most new drug ap­provals since 1997, it al­so saw more biotechs file for bank­rupt­cy than in any year since 2011: 14, if you in­clude dis­graced gi­ant Pur­due Phar­ma. And that’s not in­clud­ing all the re­verse merg­ers, which led to the dis­ap­pear­ance of a host of failed biotechs: Pro­teon, NewLink, Cona­tus and Vi­cal, among many oth­ers.

Chris Doko­ma­ji­lar

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Bank­rupt­cies in biotech are gen­er­al­ly rare. Rar­er still in the ab­sence of a re­ces­sion and with the in­dus­try still awash in cash. Like every year, a cou­ple of biotechs sim­ply ran out of mon­ey as their main as­set fiz­zled. But oth­er fail­ures can be read as a stress-test for the in­dus­try’s blind spots and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in a year where fed­er­al in­ves­ti­ga­tors pur­sued opi­oid man­u­fac­tur­ers and biotech ex­ecs joined pub­lic health ex­perts in rais­ing alarms about the state of an­tibi­otics re­search. Those fail­ures in­clude:

• 3 com­pa­nies fac­ing opi­oid law­suits
• 3 biotechs lost in the an­tibi­otics desert
• 1 start­up with a trendy pitch that caught the eye of re­porters and in­vestors but ul­ti­mate­ly had lit­tle sci­ence be­hind it
• 2 biotech over­come by le­gal is­sues out­side opi­oid ped­dling

The biotechs had col­lec­tive­ly raised at least $2 bil­lion since 2010, ac­cord­ing to da­ta from Deal For­ma’s Chris Doko­ma­ji­lar. We’ll go through each.

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