Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals

According to Sebastian Rowe of Harvard Graduate School, the modern drug discovery pipeline is filled with expensive failures. From the first process of finding a drug target to submitting applications to the Food and Drug administrations for approvals, each process takes millions upon millions of dollars to produce few promising results. Most of them do…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already changing healthcare as we know it. When it comes to identifying numerous life-changing diseases, studies indicate that deep learning or machine-based algorithms beat medical professionals. For example, one international dermatology study, spanning Germany, France and the US, used a deep learning neural network to identify skin cancer. It fed the…

Big pharmaceutical companies’ credit ratings in the United States have been steadily dropping in the eyes of rating agencies since 2014. There have since been approximately 20 downgrades and only three upgrades among investment-grade firms. Despite these companies receiving acclaim for their rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the strong barriers to competition in the…

The UK has long been criticized by the pharmaceutical industry for the slow rate at which the NHS receives new medicines. According to an analysis by Pfizer in 2017, the UK has a 75 per cent lower uptake of new drugs in their first year of release, rivalled by France, Switzerland, the US, and Germany.…

Hong Kong is experiencing a biotech boom. In 2020, new biotechnology listings in Hong Kong raised more than 6.4 billion USD, almost 100 per cent more than in 2019. This has continued into the new year as follow-on equity issuances (the sale of shares by already listed groups) by biotech firms listed in Hong Kong…