Life Science Today 083 – Stryker + Vocera, Merck KGaA + Exelead, BeiGene, Eikon
Introduction
Welcome to Life Science Today, your source for stories, insights, and trends across the life science industry. I’m your host, Dr. Noah Goodson. This week, devices with tech enablement, nano particles, Chinese approvals, and a massive series B for biotechnology.
Disclaimer
The views expressed on Life Science Today are those of the host and guests. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any organizations with which they are affiliated.
Stryker’s $3B Acquisition
Last week, Stryker quietly announced the $3B acquisition of Vocera Communications, Inc at $79.25/share. Stryker is primarily known as a medical device company and most of their acquisitions fall into that category. The heart of Vocera’s value is digital technology to connect hospitals to medical devices securely and remotely. As care continues to move out of the clinic with the pandemic and evolution of technology, the need for access to data from medical devices becomes increasingly important. Vocera’s platform is specifically designed to enable the flow of disparate remote data to a range of providers and back to facilitate care. Along side this there are solutions for remote care for mobile nursing.
Certain aspects of medical care are more amenable to remote integrations, and both devices and surgical interventions tend to have an increased value for outpatient monitoring. Stryker has such a massive range of solutions that it’s not immediately obvious to me if they see Vocera as an added service to expand home health solutions, or if they plan to utilize the underlying technology to power at-home device integrations. At $3B this is not some niche acquisition, but rather a concerted effort by a major medical device company to empower both home health and remote monitoring with device integration. It suggests you will see these kinds of solutions move from features, to scaled application in the next couple of years.
Merck KGaA Acquires Nano Particle Manufacturer Exelead
Merck KGaA has announced the $780M cash acquisition of the contract development and manufacturing company (CDMO) Exelead. Anything mRNA related is hot stuff since 2020, but one of the keys to mRNA technologies and numerous other injectables is the manufacture and delivery of highly specialized lipid-nano particles (LNPs). We have only started to scratch the surface of the potential within the LNP world. Not only are there numerous types and formulations, there is nearly infinite potential for tagged and targeted LNPs. Development and delivery in this space has the potential to meaningfully shift the way therapies are delivered across most of medicine from injectables to topicals. From a business perspective there is both an immediate boom of companies that need to produce LNP solutions and a long-term prospect of major innovation across the market. All of this value combines with the foundation of Merck KGaA’s own pipeline needs. I’d expect more development of LNP empowered products from that corner moving forward.
BieGene Chinese Approval
BeiGene is the Chinese Pharma super star. With major international success, a booming pipeline, and core collaborations they are set to continue market growth in the coming decade. One of their leading oncology products, Tislelizumab, received its sixth approval in China last week. China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has given the PD-1 inhibitor the thumbs up for second- and third-line treatments of Locally Advanced or Metastatic Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. With decades of coal power and a population that consumes 25% of the worlds cigarettes, there is a massive emerging market across China alone for oncology solutions. BeiGene itself has seen a recent drop in stock prices after a poor debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in December and some other questions about the companies continued negative revenue position. With multiple candidates set for global success in Brukinsa and Tislelizumab and a promising pipeline BeiGene will likely be able to pull through, but they still have a few steps to go in winning US and EU market share to establish themselves as a stable and profitable long-term company.
Eikon Therapeutics $0.5B Series B
Eikon Therapeutics has asserted that insanely large capital raises have not ended in 2022. Last week, the company announced the closing of a $518M series B, bringing their total investment since 2014 to $668M. Eikon is a biotechnology company with a core solution focused on live cell imaging and a huge range of investors have bought in to this round. Eikon’s technology has made major advancement in live cell imaging at the molecular level. This requires the combination of sophisticated imagining, robotics, computational biology, and incredibly advanced molecular chemistry. When leveraged at scale Eikon’s solution may be able to meaningfully advance drug discovery by observing interactions at the molecularly level in real time. $0.5B is a lot of money, but Eikon has pulled together a range of sophisticated technologies into a unified solution. Currently, Eikon does not have a clear commercialization pipeline, but I suspect some of this major investment will be to build out the facilities need to produce all the robotics and chemistry solutions for customers. Either way, advancing this kind of coalescence of engineering and science into a unified platform is a major undertaking that could turn Eikon into something akin to next-generation gene sequencing companies of a decade ago.
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Story References
Stryker + Vocera
Merck KGaA + Exelead
BeiGene
Eikon
About the Show
Life Science Today is your source for stories, insights, and trends across the life science industry. Expect weekly highlights about new technologies, pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions, news about the moves of venture capital and private equity, and how the stock market responds to biotech IPOs. Life Science Today also explores trends around clinical research, including the evolving patterns that determine how drugs and therapies are developed and approved. It’s news, with a dash of perspective, focused on the life science industry.