The End­points 100: Biotech ex­ecs stam­pede in­to 2018 with a cheer for the FDA and bull­ish feel­ings on pub­lic mar­kets, pri­vate in­vestors and a ‘hot’ M&A fu­ture

Biotech ex­ec­u­tives are pumped about 2018.

In our on­go­ing sur­vey of the End­points 100 — a list dom­i­nat­ed by the chiefs of a range of small, medi­um and large biotechs — these ex­ecs voiced a near-unan­i­mous cheer for Scott Got­tlieb and the job he’s do­ing at the FDA, where most see re­al, fast progress in speed­ing and im­prov­ing the drug re­view process, with even more to come in the year ahead.

There’s a sense that the de­bate over drug prices is here to stay, with a sol­id ma­jor­i­ty look­ing for the is­sue to grow even more in­tense in 2018.

The vast ma­jor­i­ty of these com­pa­nies plan to add to their staffs in the com­ing 12 months, as ven­ture in­vest­ing re­mains ei­ther good or ex­cel­lent.

The pub­lic mar­kets are viewed even some­what bet­ter than ear­li­er checks — though we took this sur­vey as US mar­kets ex­pe­ri­enced their worst week in two years.

And af­ter a long cool spell on the M&A front, a big ma­jor­i­ty are look­ing for the M&A front to run hot, with val­u­a­tions high to medi­um.

I’ll get in­to much more de­tail with what ex­ecs are say­ing be­low, but that’s the quick read on the buoy­ant sen­ti­ment that un­der­scores the in­dus­try at the be­gin­ning of this sec­ond year of the End­points 100 sur­vey. We’re al­so of­fer­ing a look at how some of these is­sues on ac­cess to cap­i­tal and pub­lic mar­kets have trend­ed since we launched the first sur­vey back in the fourth quar­ter of 2016.

Al­to­geth­er a record 91 biotech ex­ecs com­plet­ed the sur­vey by the dead­line. Our thanks to all of them, be­cause the sur­vey de­pends on the da­ta, and no in­dus­try can un­der­stand that bet­ter than biotech. — John Car­roll