One of the most useful tools in a healthcare investor’s arsenal is medical conferences.
Why? Key opinion leaders (KOLs) meet to discuss the latest data coming out from company-sponsored trials and research. Their views give an unrivaled and direct insight not just into the probability of success but also the commercial potential of various medical interventions.
One way to get a quick overview is summary quotes captured by the Stream blog like this summary of ACC ’23.
NB If you want to have free two-week trial access to the full database of transcripts click here.
File this under – things that could radically change the US healthcare market that few are talking about.
Federal rules, that took effect 6th of October 2022, mean for the first time patients get unrestricted access to their health data and can choose who else does.
“To think that we actually have greater transparency about our personal finances than about our own health is quite an indictment,” said Isaac Kohane, a professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School. “This will go some distance toward reversing that.”
Outsourcing in the biotech and pharma industry continues unabated, boosting contract research organisations (CRO) like IQIVIA, Labcorp etc.
Interestingly, consolidation has been a big feature of the industry, and this Stream expert call (sign up for free two weeks to access) suggests more is to come.
The first part looks at the company pre-Covid – “From 2016 right up until the emergence of COVID-19, Moderna could barely hold it together, as it was shedding key executives, top talent, and major investors at an alarming rate.”
The second part covers how the Covid crisis “bailed” the company out and the circumstances around this.
What if I told you that the idea that “People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend” is wrong?
That is exactly what this post does (in the Snippet tradition of contrarian ideas like here and here).
“Consider using the identical logic to describe, say, why people get wealthy. Economists would (I hope) be embarrassed by a money-balance theory of wealth: People get rich because they take in more money than they spend. Clearly wealthy people did. We know that because they’re wealthy. The increase in wealth is the positive money balance. But this says nothing about how or why they accumulate such wealth. In obesity research, this tautological logic — saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either — was allowed to become the central dogmatic truth.“
Then what does cause obesity? “People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.“
Covid is having one huge positive impact if governments seize it.
In its results Roche said of diagnostics equipment – “we are installing in one year what we have installed the prior five years. So we are more than doubling our installed base out there of the systems.“
This huge increase in capacity, they go on to say, could be used to detect HPV (saving 300,000 women’s lives who die of cervical cancer every year), HepC (helping 80 million people who live with this disease), and Tuberculosis (“one-fifth of population has infection of the bacteria of tuberculosis worldwide”).
“We need to start to recognize what health care systems can do by intervening much earlier. And I have to say, there is such an opportunity and governments need to get going on this. I’m sorry to get a bit emotional on this, but I have been fighting for 10 years with governments to include HPV screening and all the clinical data is out there, and they need to get going, and not just you know let it go, like they have in the past.“
US clearly stands out as it spends far more on healthcare than any other rich country in the world yet has little to show for it in terms of life expectancy improvement. Source.
Earlier this year we covered Biogen’s decision to file Aducanumab (their experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease) here and here.
This saga reignited this past week with the publication of FDA adcom documents which on the surface looked positive sending the shares soaring only to be voted down (8-1) at the meeting on Friday sending them crashing down.
This really good blog post discusses these events and why it is always important to read all the details.
The final FDA outcome is yet to be determined (Adcom decisions aren’t binding) and as previously highlighted could be political.
“To say that healthcare in China is a growth story is an understatement: despite the country’s per capita spending growing at 16% p.a. over the past 18 years, it is still only 1/7th that of the UK and1/17th that of the US.“
“Consider the country’s changing demographics: in 1970, the median age was 19 years; today that figure is 38, and by 2040 it is projected to be 47.“
“As people age, they tend to experience more ailments, which require more (and costlier) treatments: according to Bernstein, Americans aged 25 or younger use five prescriptions per year, while those aged 65 or older use a whopping 46 scripts!“
However, these views are outdated (data tends to run to 2010), often fail to account for start-ups (i.e. by following a pre-existing cohort) and are an extrapolation of a trend.
The pictured chart is an updated graph of the number of new drugs or new molecular entities (NMEs) per $bn of R&D spend.
Interestingly it has actually been stable for much of the 2000s and can be explained in part by the industry having better information and how it is used. This article explains in depth.
