Ahead of the BIO Investor Forum Digital, Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath spoke with Alex Karnal, Partner and Managing Director at Deerfield, which manages $10 billion in assets focused on curing disease. In the latest episode of the I AM BIO Podcast, they discuss biotechnology's bright future.
“The greatest medical threat we’ve ever faced is happening concurrently with our greatest understanding ever of how to survive and conquer it,” says BIO President and CEO Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, as we're uncovering breakthroughs in our understanding of genomics to prevent and cure disease.
And biotech investors are some of the most important decision makers in the effort to end the COVID-19 pandemic and to bring about this “golden age of medicine.”
“We are about to enter the golden age of therapeutic development,” says Karnal. We’ll look back in 20 years and see this as “one of the most fruitful times in terms of the number of medicines we get approved, but more importantly, the level of efficacy…will also hit an unprecedented level.”
With more than 5K medicines in development today, more than half of which are “completely new approaches to eliminating disease,” he explains, “we are setting up for a tailwind of growth that’s going to drive this industry forward.”
“The biotech industry will be one of the greatest sources of job creation, and one of the greatest resources for our country to pull us back out on the other side of COVID,” he says.
And the key to a “thriving and productive biotech industry” in the United Statesis the fact that “we still have a free market,” he continues. “Free markets bring capital, they bring incredible people, and they bring an energy that allows us to solve complex problems over and over again.”
Listen to the whole thing to hear more of Alex Karnal's thoughts on how drug pricing policy affects investors' decisions as well as his work on Governor Ned Lamont’s Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group and why diagnostics are so important to getting the country back to normal.
Listen at www.bio.org/podcast or your favorite podcast platform, including Apple, Google, or Spotify.
Want to hear more from biotech investors? Register for BIO Investor Forum Digital.
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