Dutch healthcare insurer Achmea and investment company Life Sciences Partners (LSP) have set up an investment fund for innovation in healthcare, the LSP-Health Economics Fund (LSP-HEF). On 5 September 2011, the healthcare insurer already announced its intention to make € 50 million available for this purpose. As of today, the fund is ‘open for business’ and will seek to invest in international technology companies that may contribute to increased healthcare quality and better cost control.
These days, everybody has his own opinion about the quality and prospects of the German biotechnology industry. It even seems to be difficult to determine if biotech funding in Germany has increased, remained stable – or dramatically decreased, as recently published by the German industry organization BIO Deutschland.
If you look at key intangibles, such as the extent of media coverage on the biotech sector and the attractiveness of German biotech companies for investment banks, it is obvious that German biotech is not on the rise.
Everybody knows of instances in their own life where initial “mistakes” or wrong decisions turned out to be exactly the right thing. Trivial examples include going to a party that you never really wanted to attend and ending up meeting the person of your life – or running ten minutes late and thereby avoiding a fatal car crash that had just occured down the road.
But what about the most carefully managed area in life – your own career and business? Thinking that wrong business decisions must mean the end of your career? The opposite may be the case, says Paul J.H. Schoemaker, research director of Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation and chairman and founder of consulting firm Decision Strategies International.
The recent election in Germany’s federal state of Berlin ended with a surprise: a previously almost unknown party, the Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) won 15 of the 152 state parliament seats; nearly every one in ten voters in Berlin casted his ballot for this group, which was founded in 2006 by mostly male young academics and internet-affiliate people.
The program of the party is not very detailed and focuses almost entirely on freedom of information, free access to the internet, free rides on public transport, legalization of drugs and a free basic income for everyone living permanently in Germany.
While the program does not say anything about economic policy (nor on defense or international policy), it includes several statements on the life sciences and pharma industry.
Last month, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsilvania dedicated a special edition of their prestigious Knowledge@Wharton newsletter to the biopharmaceutical industry. Most importantly, the authors dealt with the pressing question how the industry may continue to develop innovative drugs – and get them approved faster.
Summarizing the current challenges, the report states that “no one doubts that the drug industry’s traditional model for developing new cures is badly broken. Fewer exciting new medicines are reaching patients these days, even as spending on research and development has risen and blockbuster drugs that have long been the backbone of pharmaceutical profits have lost their patent protection. A widening gap divides the discovery of promising new laboratory compounds from the ability to turn them into innovative therapies. A similar gap separates recent scientific gains in understanding genes from the creation of new drugs that use this knowledge to fight disease.”
