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BFD Expert Voices - Health Tech Deals

BFD Expert Voices

Biotech faces a crossroads of unprecedented access to new technology and mounting policy uncertainty, panelists said at an Axios event Sunday night, ahead of the Milken Institute Global Conference.

Why it matters: Regulatory upheaval threatens to strangle innovation, which is pharma's lifeblood.

What they're saying: "I've been involved in starting companies and growing companies in this sector for 38 years. It has never been as bad as this at all," Flagship Pioneering and Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan said. 

"Many of our biotech partners are feeling quite pinched," said Amgen EVP of research and development Jay Bradner. "And the academic colleagues ... are feeling pinched as well."

"My biggest concern ... is around the evisceration of the FDA," said Protas CEO Martin Landry. "What's that regulatory pathway look like?"

State of play: The current capital environment "massively favors partnerships between incumbents and insurgents," Afeyan said, with less funding runway for biotech platforms with a handful of drug candidates in varying levels of clinical development. 

Instead of waiting to license late-stage, proven assets, pharma companies should be creating "innovation supply chains," Afeyan said. 

Between the lines: While the industry is already using AI and quantum computing to speed drug discovery and development, it's not cheap or easy.

"One of the big challenges for AI in their discovery space is that we pay for our large datasets — data point by data point," said Terray Therapeutics CEO Jacob Berlin. 

"Whereas the other uses of AI in large datasets — like Netflix, Google — the users provide the data at a tremendous scale, not only for free, but they actually pay to provide the data."

Zoom in: A 2022 study of 15 AI-developed drug candidates found that more than half took a decade to get to the trial stage. And some of the first AI-designed drugs have fallen short in the clinic.

Flagship-backed Generate Biomedicines, which uses AI to develop hyper-targeted drugs, has a drug candidate in the clinic that could leapfrog from Phase 1 to Phase 3 trials, said Flagship managing partner Paul Parker.

"Taking a year and a half off of the 14-year process — these are all the different pain points that we have to start working backwards from," he said.

What we're watching: Whether biotech IP could be subject to tariffs, after President Trump's threat to impose them on the film industry. 

"I don't see the U.S. leaving Chinese IP alone without tariffing the hell out of it," Afeyan said.  

The bottom line: "The entire industry has to figure out a new model for capital raising and capital funding and capital deployment," Parker said. 

Biotech investing "has never been as bad as this"

Panelists at an Axios event before Milken identified the issues facing the sector.

Expert voices table at the Milken conference in Los Angeles yesterday. 

Expert voices table at the Milken conference in Los Angeles on Sunday. Photo: Courtesy Emily Hamilton

Biotech faces a crossroads of unprecedented access to new technology and mounting policy uncertainty, panelists said at an Axios event Sunday night, ahead of the Milken Institute Global Conference.Why it matters: Regulatory <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="upheaval" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/pro/biotech-deals/2025/04/28/fda-upheaval-vc-biotech-deals" data-vars-content-id="0d7f715c-5f13-44b1-b97e-97648366b22c" data-vars-headline="Biotech investing &quot;has never been as bad as this&quot;" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/pro/biotech-deals/2025/04/28/fda-upheaval-vc-biotech-deals" target="_self">upheaval</a> threatens to strangle innovation, which is pharma&#x27;s lifeblood.

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Biotech investing "has never been as bad as this"

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