A look at financing, M&A and alliance activity April–June 2017
• By Amanda Micklus and Maureen Riordan
Device and diagnostics fundraising slumped in Q2, but there was a substantial uptick in M&A activity. Device financings totaled just slightly over half of the previous quarter, while acquisitions grew almost six-fold, thanks primarily to Becton Dickinson's $23.5 billion play for CR Bard. Financing in diagnostics slid to $1.03 billion, less than half of Q1, whereas the $1.7 billion in M&As (most of that from PerkinElmer's $1.3 billion buy of EuroImmun) was more than double Q1's aggregate.
Continuing the downward trend in financing over the past several quarters, the device industry collected $1.2 billion in Q2 funding, a 48% decrease from Q1's $2.3 billion total. It is worth noting, however, that Q1 did include a single outlier transaction worth $800 million (by Verily Life Sciences LLC[See Deal]), significantly boosting that quarter's value.
In the second quarter, just over one-third of financing came from debt transactions, which totaled $436 million. (See Exhibit 1.)...
A discussion with Karen Harris, CFO of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, about the foundation's investment strategy, biotech and investor sentiment at the recent BIO conference and what innovations give her hope for Alzheimer's patients.
Against a backdrop of shifting trade policies, the end of multilateral market approaches and renewed focus on supply chain resilience, medtechs are doubling down on innovation in products and processes – using AI – and keeping unmet needs and outcomes in the center of the target.
While biopharma companies experiment with genAI, agentic AI is rapidly shifting the work paradigm towards one of autonomous digital workers that can handle entire process flows.