Optimum’s 16th Annual Healthcare Investor Conference highlights life sciences feel good factor for 2025
Optimism has well and truly returned to life sciences and this newfound confidence was reflected in many of the discussions at this year’s Optimum Strategic Communications Healthcare Investor Conference.
Held at the prestigious King’s Fund venue in central London, the great and good of the biotech and pharma industry met to reflect on the events of 2024 and look forward to 2025 and beyond.
The conference began with a discussion about biotech IPOs – which were hardly seen in the dark days of 2023, but which are now becoming increasingly common.
The pent-up demand means there is now a long list of IPOs waiting to happen in the U.S., with paperwork filed with the SEC.
With so many biotechs emerging onto the public markets, the importance of clear messaging was a thread that ran throughout the conference.
It is crucial to lay the groundwork for an IPO by clearly managing investor expectations and being realistic from the outset about a company’s likely progress after launch.
The level of scrutiny intensifies quickly when a company goes public, and it is vital to ensure that investors have a clear but realistic understanding of the building blocks to valuation and the timing of key milestones.
And even with markets proving to be resilient, despite the uncertain geopolitical situation and upcoming U.S. elections, the advice was that IPOs are not for every company.
This chimed with another message, that it is important to make the fundamentals of your business as solid as possible.
Having a clear idea about figures such as burn rates, and key inflection points, such as a major clinical trial readouts, will translate into clearer and more effective messaging that will maintain investor interest in the business as it develops.
There was also a discussion about the challenges of building European champions, where the age-old debate about the lack of capital available in Europe emerged.
This panel featured leaders from European biotechs and major investors who gave their opinions and insights into building successful life sciences businesses.
It is still true that the big money is in the U.S., where there is sufficient interest in biotech that analysts will even cover a specific indication.
But there is a lack of mid-sized companies in Europe, which must move Stateside to develop and grow. There was a counterargument that, as long as jobs are being generated, this does not matter – yet the global capital structure of the industry means many jobs inevitably move to the U.S.
Another point made, was the increasing importance of being in the right geographical location – investors preferred businesses close to a biotech innovation “hub,” such as Cambridge in the UK, or Basel in Switzerland.
Johnson & Johnson, for example, aims to find and accelerate early-stage innovations developed in these busy life sciences hubs across the world. They do that by working regionally from their innovation centres, with collaboration teams offering deep scientific and commercial expertise, as well as industry-leading incubation and investment support. The J&J EMEA Innovation Centre in London, under the leadership of Dr Nerida Scott, aims to tap into the research conducted in the region by building links with academia and emerging biotechs.
One of the highlights of the conference was Scott’s fireside chat with Dr Daniel Mahony, senior partner at Novo Holdings, Growth Investments, where these two biotech influencers discussed how to accelerate innovation.
According to Scott, Europe is an amazing place to find talented biotechs and entrepreneurs because of its diverse innovation talent, with huge potential for scientific breakthroughs, and also preventive health systems, in place because of state-funded healthcare systems such as the NHS.
The European approach to healthcare could be very different from that in the U.S. The value and impact of innovation is driven by understanding disease risk, delivering prevention and early interception to prevent people from getting ill, or delivering cures in earlier (more treatable) stages of disease presentation. This has the potential to generate better patient outcomes and drive GDP growth.
Diseases of old age are hugely costly, when patients are more likely to develop co-morbidities that place a burden on the patient, their families, and the healthcare system.
Dr Mehmood Khan, CEO and founder of the Hevolution Foundation, spoke with Clive Cookson, senior science writer at the Financial Times about the concept of “healthspan” – the expansion of the number of healthy years in a patient’s life.
Hevolution is a Saudi-backed non-profit that focuses on advancing healthspan through significant R&D funding of around $1 billion a year and strategic investments in biotechnology.
The Foundation’s work involves collaboration with the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is actively seeking academic spinouts and top talent in the field.
The overarching goal is to make the field of aging research more attractive and encourage global participation by supporting groundbreaking science and entrepreneurship.
A significant challenge in aging research is the absence of a clear regulatory pathway for aging-related interventions.
Hevolution’s model emphasises funding science and bringing long-term, high-risk projects to fruition.
Instead of focusing solely on return on investment, this allows more flexibility in advancing scientific progress, filing gaps left by both the public and private sectors.
Hevolution is working to create a pipeline of scientific ideas that can eventually transition into viable market solutions, according to Khan.
Ending, as is tradition, with Optimum’s chosen charity, Martin Hywood, Regional Corporate New Business Officer, Muscular Dystrophy UK, gave an emotional account of his diagnosis with a form of the disease.
Hywood uses skills and knowledge from previous careers as a mechanic and IT to drive forward fundraising for the charity. It was an uplifting end to a conference celebrating the best in European talent and the investors that make life sciences innovation possible.
We would like to thank our wonderful speakers for generating brilliant discussions and providing important insights. Connecting at events and sharing expertise is a great reminder of the fantastic industry that we work in, whose common goal is the improvement of patient care.
Another huge thank you to our sponsors Babraham Research Campus, Citi, Cooley, ICG and Nasdaq for their collaboration. It has been great to have the support of these industry leaders at our event.
If you enjoyed the conference this year, make sure to save the date for 2025!
📍 Thursday the 9th October 2025, once again at The King’s Fund, London.
