This panel featured Dr. Hubert Birner, Managing Partner of TVM; Dr. Michelle Dipp, Managing Director of General Atlantic; Jan-Daniel Neumann, Managing Director of Bregal Unternehmenskapital; Daniel Nieper, Global Head Strategy and Mergers & Acquisitions of Siegfried AG; Dr. Michael Ruoff, Partner of Think.Health Ventures; Dominik Schwarz, Director of EMH Partners and Kristian A. Werling, partner at McDermott Will & Emery. Moderating the panel was Dr. Stephan Rau, partner at McDermott Will & Emery.
Drawing on the panellists different experiences, the discussion focused on how digitalization—driven by the personalization of data—will undoubtedly disrupt life sciences as it revolutionizes investment decisions within this field.
Investing in digitalization has and will make the entire drug industry more effective, and all business ideas within life sciences are linked with digitalization. However, big data is still useless right now, as what is really needed is structured data for further progress.
Investing in the transaction value market is necessary to bridge the gap between simply gathering information and actually using data. All of the panellists agreed, however, that truly changing the health care system is much more complex and difficult, even if it is just on a national level. This is further complicated by the fact that there is virtually zero tolerance for failure within the pharma industry.
The panel further identified the value of health products as the single biggest difference between the United States and Europe in this field. Not only is there an immense price difference of health products between the United States and Europe, but there is also the fact that 70 percent of health products are financed by the United States. This enables and results in huge transatlantic M&A possibilities and opportunities.
However, the panel still predicts greater innovation in life sciences outside of the United States as lower costs and stronger and more accessible work forces facilitate a more competitive and open market within Europe. It is expected that more and more US firms will buy non-US pharma and health companies to increase their efficiency as the focus continuously remains on pharma pricing. This focus on pharma pricing, however, will furthermore have a rather negative effect on innovation as the amount investors are willing to pay for a drug is indeed limited.
Overall, latest trends within data collection show a shared interest to use data to justify increased pharma prices as the key challenge continues to be data protection regimes.
Chaired by
Dr. Stephan Rau,
McDermott Will & Emery