Btobioinnovation.com

Author: Jean-Claude Muller, 穆卓Executive Editor at BtoBioInnovation  jcm9144@gmail.com

SPECIAL REPORT #21.11

Covid 19-vaccine spending and a focus on some European Biotechnology Companies

We are starting this new week and month with a short roundup of the COVID-19 business and with an interesting focus on some European biotechnology companies.

According to a recent report by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, the spending on COVID-19 vaccines puts the figure at $157 billion through 2025. The IQVIA projects $53 billion in 2021 and $51 billion in 2022 followed by a significant drop in 2023. The spending decrease over time would mainly come from a drop in price rather than demand. Average cost per dose would decrease from $22 in 2020 to $19 in 2022 and then $9 in 2023, $7 in 2024 and down to $5 by 2025. There are already seven approved vaccines in one part of the world or the other and there are more coming which will automatically trigger a decline in price over time. The greatest uncertainty right now is linked to the potential need of booster shots for the subjects already vaccinated. Planned global manufacturing capacity does not seem to be a major concern anymore.  For instance Moderna is expected to produce upward of 1 billion doses of its vaccine in 2021 and up to 3 billion doses worldwide by 2022. Similar figures were given by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech.

In a recent article by Victoria English, in the April issue of Mednous, she reports that an increasing number of “European biotechs have been migrating to the US Nasdaq market in order to take advantage of the huge liquidity advantages there”.

A thorough analysis of her published data shows that 49 European biotech companies are listed (as of June 30, 2020) at the US Nasdaq.  Out of the 49 companies (11 from the UK, 6 from Germany, 6 from the Netherlands, 6 from France, 6 from Ireland, 4 from Switzerland, 2 from Belgium and 1 from Sweden), 15 have market capitalisation value exceeding $1 billion as of March 31, 2021.

1. BioNTech (Germany) at $26.372 billion
2. Genmab (Denmark) at $21.532 billion
3. Horizon Therapeutics (U.K.) at $20.624 billion
4. Curevac (Germany) at $17.095 billion
5. Argenx (Belgium) at $14.027 billion
6. Jazz Pharmaceuticals (Ireland) at $9.258 billion
7. CRISP Therapeutics (Switzerland) at $9.191 billion
8. Ascendis Pharma (Denmark) at $6.927 billion
9. Galapagos (Belgium) at $5.050 billion
10. Morphosys (Germany) at $2.868 billion
11. Endo International (Ireland) at $1.708 billion
12. Uniqure (The Netherlands) at $1.516 billion
13. Zeeland Pharma (Denmark) at$ 1.388 billion
14. Compass Pathways (U.K.) at $1.350 billion
15. Prothena Therapeutics (Ireland) at $1.106 billion

Noteworthy no French company appears it this top 15 ranking.

Leaders and laggards in terms of quarterly market capitalisation change between December 31, 2020 and March 31, 2021.

Itherum Therapeutics (Ireland) + 412%

ObsEva (Switzerland) + 142%

Prothera Corporation (Ireland) + 130%

Orchard Therapeutics (U.K.) + 113%

DBV (France) +103%

Galecto (Denmark) – 51.4%

Freeline Therapeutics (U.K.) -32.6%

Cellectis (France) -25.3%

ADC Therapeutics (Switzerland) -23.7%

Morphosys (Germany) -23.1%.

In the same Mednous April issue, Chris Maggos, Head of Europe for LifeSci Advisors suggests “that a pan-European biotechnology exchange traded fund (ETF) could provide opportunities to hedge against risk exposure and volatile market swing” and thus “offer a quantitative indicator of how well Europe is doing in maturing its biotechnology sector”.

Right now, as stated above, the trend for many European biotechnology companies is to rapidly get listed on the U.S. exchange.

Paris May 3, 2021

This document has been prepared by btobioinnovation and is provided to you for information purposes only.  The information contained in this document has been obtained from sources that btobioinnovation believes are reliable but btobioinnovation does not warrant that it is accurate or complete. The views presented in this document are those of btobioinnovation’s editor at the time of writing and are subject to change.  btobioinnovation has no obligation to update its opinions or the information in this document.