The E100 biotech sur­vey: Ex­ecs are hun­ker­ing down for the pan­dem­ic, wor­ried about longterm fall­out — but ea­ger to see bio­phar­ma make a dif­fer­ence

The coro­n­avirus out­break that has been spread­ing around the world hasn’t caused se­ri­ous im­me­di­ate dam­age to the clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment plans for most biotech ex­ecs. But many are deeply con­cerned that it will even­tu­al­ly de­rail key projects — and the vast ma­jor­i­ty are busi­ly hatch­ing and ex­e­cut­ing plans to keep their staff as safe as pos­si­ble as the con­ta­gion spreads in key hubs.

That’s the bot­tom line from End­points News’ lat­est sur­vey of in­dus­try ex­ec­u­tives, which cov­ers the think­ing of 70 biotech ex­ecs dur­ing the worst pan­dem­ic they’ve seen in their life­times.

We’ve been gath­er­ing their re­spons­es over the past week, and some dis­tinct trends are clear.

This is a flu­id, fast-chang­ing sit­u­a­tion, and these ex­ecs know it. And with con­firmed cas­es still on the low side — a sit­u­a­tion like­ly to change fast as test­ing be­comes wide­ly avail­able — the ini­tial im­pact has been slight. But there are some ear­ly ef­fects be­ing reg­is­tered in vi­ral hot spots, with fears that they will grow with the glob­al con­ta­gion now un­der­way.

The high­lights of our E100 sur­vey:

— 86% of them re­port­ed no im­me­di­ate im­pact on de­vel­op­ment ef­forts, but 72% are clear­ly wor­ried that it’s com­ing.

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