Biotech in 2025: Opportunities Amid Uncertainty

Well, given the forward look, I'm going to ask you to look backwards and orient us a little bit with 2024 and the biotech sector.

It was kind of a challenging year.

It really was, Jane.

And look, it was a kind of a year of ups and downs.

2024 started off very well.

There was a lot of enthusiasm about rate cuts at the beginning of the year.

And certainly the equity capital markets and the IPO market opened up nicely as people were expecting rate cuts later in 2024.

As I would say, the narrative began to change and the rate cuts didn't come as people expected or fast as people expected.

The performance of the markets within life sciences and biotech became more challenging, truly became a market of haves and have-nots.

Not all negatives, certainly bright spots there, but certainly the market and the year had its challenges.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, the stocks underperformed.

Look, I think when you look at the overall markets, you look at NASDAQ, look at the S&P 500, the XBI, which is really kind of one of the more, I would say, visible indices in the biotech space, was only up around 1%.

In Canada, that's after it was reweighted at the middle of the year to really skew towards larger cap names.

NASDAQ was up around 30%.

The S&P 500 up around 25%.

So, Charlie, the sector certainly has its challenges and risk.

Yeah, yeah.

And another aspect of that, you know, I think there were high hopes for M&A.

And there, too, it was not a great year.

I mean, 2023 was really a fantastic year, probably one of the best years in the last decade.

The largest transaction was the Pfizer C-gen transaction.

But overall, there was a lot of activity in 2023.

There was activity in 2024, in particular, more in the first half of the year.

But volumes were down.