Biotech ex­ecs are feel­ing up­beat and look­ing to grow their com­pa­nies, but an un­der­tow of fresh con­cerns nags many

Biotech ex­ecs over­all are in a good mood these days.

Yes, the pub­lic mar­kets aren’t near­ly as wide open as they were a year ago. Not every­one finds it easy to tap ven­ture in­vestors for more cash on the pre-IPO side of the busi­ness. And there’s a dis­tinct un­der­tow of con­cern with clear notes of anx­i­ety that the fi­nanc­ing trend is tip­ping to­ward tougher times ahead.

But most are still con­fi­dent in their own abil­i­ty to raise more mon­ey in a cash-hun­gry busi­ness, they’re def­i­nite­ly in hir­ing mode, large­ly find­ing ex­cel­lent can­di­dates for the work — though per­haps work­ing hard­er than ever to make sure of that — and more up­beat than ever re­gard­ing reg­u­la­tors’ abil­i­ty to judge their da­ta; all while look­ing for­ward to what comes next.

That, in a nut­shell, is what we found in End­points News’ first quar­ter­ly con­fi­dence sur­vey of the glob­al biotech in­dus­try.

But what I found even more in­ter­est­ing than the hard num­bers from this sur­vey are the thoughts they shared on deal­mak­ing, biotech val­u­a­tions, hir­ing and more. As a group, this ex­ec­u­tive crowd has been do­ing a lot of think­ing about the state of af­fairs in biotech. And I’m hap­py to share many of their thoughts in the analy­sis of the num­bers be­low.

Al­to­geth­er 105 biotech ex­ecs agreed to take our sur­vey and 96 fin­ished the work. (Many of you might view that as N=96.) The group was large­ly made up of biotech CEOs, with the rest a med­ley of C-suite ex­ecs and VCs on a va­ri­ety of biotech boards from both sides of the At­lantic. Most were based in the US, with heavy con­cen­tra­tions in Cam­bridge/Boston and Cal­i­for­nia, large­ly in the Bay Area. About a quar­ter of the par­tic­i­pants were in Eu­rope, weight­ed to­ward Lon­don and the Gold­en Tri­an­gle. I specif­i­cal­ly sought out ex­ec­u­tives in the three big hubs: Boston, San Fran­cis­co and Lon­don. But a num­ber of oth­er ex­ec­u­tives were scat­tered from coast-to-coast in the US and north to south in Eu­rope.

The re­sults are pre­sent­ed in the ag­gre­gate. The in­di­vid­ual re­spons­es are con­fi­den­tial, but they al­so had an op­por­tu­ni­ty to make com­ments on the record or not for at­tri­bu­tion. And many of­fered some keen in­sights on some of the most im­por­tant is­sues fac­ing the in­dus­try.

You’ll read 30+ di­rect quotes from our End­points 100 ex­ec­u­tives and get free ac­cess to 15 in­ter­ac­tive charts. And learn:

• Has the pric­ing de­bate in the US had any im­pact on biotech de­vel­op­ment plans?
• How do biotech ex­ec­u­tives feel about their ac­cess to cap­i­tal?
• How do they rate the pub­lic and pri­vate cap­i­tal mar­kets?
• How do they rate biotech as­set val­u­a­tions — both li­cens­ing and M&A?
• Are they hir­ing? What are their thoughts on the tal­ent pool avail­able to them?
• How much do they out­source?
• Who do they sup­port: Hillary Clin­ton, or Don­ald Trump?

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