Business Of Biotech
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Business Of Biotech
Deal And Investment Trends With Investment Banker David Sans
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Today we're talking life sciences investment trends and risks with David Sans, an investment banker with an academic background in chemical engineering and molecular modeling, and a professional background that began in Big Pharma and shifted to investing over 15 years ago. Our conversation covers patent cliff implications, hot therapeutic areas and delivery mechanisms, geopolitical risks, alternative funding strategies, and private equity's move upstream to pre-clinical and pre-revenue biotech.
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Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, and I'm pleased to bring you a conversation today with David Sans, an experienced life science investment banker who knows the space from the inside out, having worked earlier in his career at companies including Novartis, Pfizer and ImClone, among others. Now David is leading healthcare and life sciences investing at D Boral Capital, formerly known as EF Hutton. On today's show, we'll learn about David's somewhat unusual career path, what he's excited about in the context of life sciences investing in 2025, context of life sciences investing in 2025, unique funding strategies for drug developers and what I'll call a dynamic policy environment in the US and what that could mean for the sector. Welcome to the show, David.
David Sans:Thank you, Ben. It's an honor to be with you and thank you for your audience at Business of Biotech.
Ben Comer:We're really pleased to speak with you today, David. Your academic background includes a master's degree in chemical engineering, a PhD in molecular modeling, as well as an MBA. Professionally, unlike plenty of other leaders in the life sciences, you moved from a career in big pharma into, with a few stops in between, the life sciences, banking and financial industry. That's in comparison to the reverse trajectory, which is former investors becoming biotech leaders. What can you tell us, David, about your career development and the reasons behind the path that you've chosen?
David Sans:Yes, thank you, Ben. So, growing up in Basel, Switzerland, I was very fortunate to have a scholarship with Novartis and I consider basically having a long career in pharma. I was brought to the US as a scientist of national interest and things change rapidly. When I came to the US, I started to see or expose to the startup community and I thought it was very interesting to see how universities and different researchers were developing so many drugs. And it was a very interesting time for me when I transitioned from big pharma to buy the company called ImClone Systems. The company did very well, was acquired by Lilly in 2008 for $6.5 billion, and after that I got this bug not going into finance first, spend a few years of learning the ropes, learning about the industry, learning the Wall Street type of industry and I learned very quickly that I really enjoyed helping CEOs. That being on the side of Wall Street was very, very interesting dealing with investors and trying to find diamonds in a rough and getting always ahead of on top of the new research and the new waves of technologies. And then I thought that I quickly saw that I had some value to provide to customers, both to CEOs of small biotech companies, but also to investors. So I do enjoy a lot working with the research department of Wall Street, learning for the new trends, looking at M&A activity in pharma, and what I saw is that in 2010, and this is something that we can continue talking about there was what we call the patent cliff, the patent expiration that was valued at that time of $30 billion. So if you think about 2010, we had products like Lipitor a lower cholesterol, a lowering Asian that was going off patent and this was a blockbuster. Altogether, there were about 60 to 70 drugs that went off patent in 2010, with a total valuation of market sales of about $30 billion.
David Sans:Fast forward then in 2025, and we always measure this in five years, batting cleave of the next five years and then the batting cleave of the next five years. So when we look at 2025 until 2030, we have 190 drugs going off patent, with a total gap where we call, basically, the pharma industry is going to lose revenues. You're going to lose $300 billion in revenue. What that brings, what that means to us, is a lot of opportunities for M&A, a lot of opportunities for investors, exit for CEOs by the companies to be acquired by Big Pharma, and providing the continuity to launch drugs into the market.
David Sans:So in summary, Ben, what I think that it's an extraordinary time today to be in banking is because we see this massive opportunity within the next 5, 10, 15 years of new technologies. We saw the weight-lowering agents that have been very successful, so we see new technology. So just to wrap it up to your question, I started in the bench as a chemist developing one of the first kinase inhibitors and I went into finance and I realized that this is a very fast-moving environment where science is unlimited. You can find science every day of the week and I thought that being in finance probably leverages a lot of my skills and I can help a lot more people.
Ben Comer:So your turn into finance coincided then with that 2010 patent cliff, which I remember covering as a journalist. Everyone was talking about it at the time and it's amazing to think how much larger the coming patent cliff is. I'm glad you, I'm happy you made that point, but you know, given your previous experience as a bench scientist, how did you, how did you make that decision to to try your hand in in finance? You know, I think, what was a kind of new field for you at that time.
David Sans:It was a new field. I I went to back to school at night, so I will work until four or 5 PM, run into the university, get the financial studies completed and then I took all the exams, all the SEC required exams. I think that once you go into the PhD, getting another degree and continuing your education is not that difficult, but definitely it was an effort. I mean you have to spend a lot more time in the school, a lot more time in learning new skills and developing your skills for a completely different industry. Also, what I thought to me personally, what was more difficult is moving from a research type of mentality to a financial services mentality. It requires a completely different skill set.
David Sans:When you are working with CEOs and investors and funds, you are a service provider. You are not leading a science. You are not. You basically have. It's a different mindset. I mean you have to generate opportunities every day, you have to think about opportunities every day and you need to make a lot of calls and you need to be very active, which is the opposite in terms of science.
David Sans:Think about the scientific process is very quiet. You need to preserve work on a lot of patents. The process is very quiet. You need to preserve work on a lot of patents. You need to be very, very careful about what things you disclose or things you don't disclose, and it's very long term. It's very binaric it works or it doesn't work. The financial industry, in terms of services, is very, very different. You have to be on the phone every day. You have to initiate conversations every day, you need to initiate ideas and you need to basically call. You need to have a lot of velocity Every day. There are about 10, 20 stocks that move very quickly and you need to build on that velocity. So, which is a very different skill set. It's a very different way of thinking about your day-to-day job and it requires basically much longer hours and more diverse. You need to basically think about quite a few things at the same time a couple of other questions just about your background.
Ben Comer:first, david One is that, in addition to working in big pharma and biotech, you also worked for a time on the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which is a large public-private partnership aimed at improving outcomes in cancer, reducing cancer deaths. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about your experience with that program?
David Sans:Yes, this started in 2016. I have become very good friends with Patrick Soon-Shiong. He's a high-net-worth individual with a lot of success with Immunity Bio and other companies, so it was at that time that he wanted to basically be on the private side of the Cancer Moonshot. Obviously, the program has evolved very, very differently from 2016 to what started in 2023 with funding new programs, so I thought it was a great opportunity. He asked me to join at that time the committee, the Cancer Moonshot Committee. It was the sweet kind of moment of the cancer moonshot where everything was possible.
David Sans:Everybody was very excited to start and then it took years before the policy, I imagine in 2016,. It was until 2023 that the program was funded. It was only until 2023 that the program was funded. Now, in 2025, it's very clear with the new administration has already stated that they want to defund the Cancer Moonshot Initiative. So I think that for the most part, if you think about the amount of time, that too it was a lot of involvement in terms of policy and it had resulted only in about two or three years of activity. Okay.
Ben Comer:Um, just one follow up. I want to ask you on this program, given that you know federal from the top kind of program to address disease, can they be effective? Are they sort of at the whim of changing administrations which make them less effective? You know what's your kind of takeaway from.
David Sans:You know your participation in that effort your kind of takeaway from you know your participation in that effort. I think that in retrospective, in hindsight, this was an idea in 2016 that basically was born out of this situation, if you think about GBM or glioblastoma. But still today it's a very difficult patient population. Once you have a tumor in the brain, you develop seizures, you develop a swelling on the brain. It's a very complicated disease and every patient is different. Every tumor, every solid tumor, has different epitopes and it's difficult. It's one of the most difficult cancers to treat and still today there is still a small increment. I mean, you can extend life weeks, maybe months, but there has been very little in terms of real impact on treating this disease.
David Sans:So this initiative started really for the most difficult treat tumors. For the tumors that pharma does not want to get involved. If you think about they're very. I cannot name one single big pharma company that has a GBM program. Roche used to have some programs but were basically reduced and almost eliminated. So the Cancer Moonshot at that time had the direction for the cancer moonshot to create more funding for places where pharma, after NIH, has done the investments. Pharma doesn't want to continue because it may have very little commercial value. Fast forward 150 million. It's still a small amount.
David Sans:I would say that the result of the impact has been not that big. But one of the things that resolved that came out of this program has been all these open labels, open access type of clinical trials where there are big consortia, there are big groups that are coming together and say guys, let's put together a protocol where we can try different drugs for different patients, not just one trial per one drug. So I think that in retrospective there has been a lot of value out of all this effort. The outcomes have been probably lower than what we expected eight years ago, but definitely, I think there's no, there has not been a waste of. It has not been a waste of efforts and results. I think there is still a very long way to go and we have made tremendous progress with clinical trial programs that didn't exist before.
Ben Comer:Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. I have one more question about your background, and then we'll bring it up to 2025. I gave an abbreviated list of your various credentials just a few minutes ago but failed to mention your FAARM designation, which I was not familiar with that designation prior to meeting you, David, and I'm hoping you could take just a couple of minutes to explain what that is to others who may not be familiar with that acronym.
David Sans:Yes, there is a whole discipline of cell therapies that we what we call the regenerative medicine. This is a discipline that was very hot Basically a few years ago. I took all the exams in 2016 to have this board certification and the idea is that we have done cell therapy for many years. If you think about bone marrow transplantation, that is a type of cell therapy. You take cells from one person, from a donor, and you give these cells to a patient. So the cell therapy space is not new. Has been around for many, many years. Space is not new. Has been around for many, many years. We believe that as we understand more the pathology of the disease and we understand more how to characterize cells, there is a whole space of cell therapies that is still not yet fully developed that we can find these type of opportunities. There is basically this vertical of specialty in medicine called regenerative medicine that is still growing. It's still being defined. The FDA has been going after a lot of these clinics that do cell therapy without the controls and without understanding, and I thought, from the pathology background, I thought it was a very interesting discipline, that it needed more studies and did more efforts, and I'm happy that I had this window opportunity when I was at Mount Sinai Icon School of Medicine to have this opportunity to have this board certification Fast forward. I still think there is a lot that we can do with cell therapies.
David Sans:A lot of funds, a lot of companies have failed in terms of developing cell therapies, but we still see the benefits of CAR T cells 98% complete response.
David Sans:We see a huge amount of benefit from CAR T cells.
David Sans:There's also a lot of cytokine release storms, a lot of toxicities that are derived from manipulating these cells, and there is a limit on how much we can manipulate these cells. I remember in 2016, 2017, we were doing a lot of manipulations to cells that now we realize it's too much. There is a limit of the type of manipulation that we can do to cells before these cells become exhausted. One of the things that we know now is that when we manipulate these cells, they can do a lot of things that we want. Now is that when we manipulate these cells, they can do a lot of things that we want them to do, but these cells become less viable and this aspect of the ability of the cell is something that was not fully understood in 2010, 2016. Now we realize this is a big factor and we still have too long of a period of time, what we call the vein-to-vein timing. It is still too long, but it has created a whole industry of CAR T-cells as the most successful aspect class of cell therapies.
Ben Comer:Excellent, thank you for explaining that, and I think F-A-A-R-M stands for the Fellowship in Anti-Aging, regenerative and Functional Medicine, and that's a program affiliated with the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. We're sure to hear more about that field. I think in some of these new modalities, it's two steps back and one forward, steps back and one forward, but it's a number of companies are working on it, so I'm excited to see what happens there. All right, we're going to move into your current role now, David, and into 2025. You're, as I mentioned, head of healthcare and life sciences investment banking at Deep World Capital. What are you excited about this year? What kinds of biotech companies or therapeutic areas are you tracking right now, and why?
David Sans:Yes, I think that 2025, as we can see will be a time with a lot of fluctuations, a lot of stock variability. We see the variability index going up tremendously. I think that there will be a lot of opportunities for a small cap. I think that for the next two, three years, we'll see a lot of M&A. We have seen a big geographic dislocation in China. China has more than 3,000 biotech companies and more and more we see M&A involved with some of the assets that are being developed in China that want to find a place, a home, here in the US, with US investors, us patients, clinical trials developed here in the US. So we're going to see a lot of these opportunities.
David Sans:There are a lot of therapeutic areas that are coming up that are very interesting. In weight loss, we see the GLP-1s and also other targets that help the regeneration of the muscle tissue. When we lose weight, we have seen with Ozempic that we also lose muscle tissue and it's very hard to recover. So it's definitely a problem that many companies and many different companies are coming up with new mechanism of action that preserve muscle tissue while you can lose fat but not the muscle tissue. So we see a lot of interest in this aspect. Fast forward with the success of Lipitor. With the success of Lipitor we saw a lot of patients with a benefit in that therapeutic class. Now, when we look at 2035, I think that we're going to see a society that will benefit from these therapies, where you can manage your muscle tissue better. The more muscle tissue we have, the better and longer we live. I mean it's remarkable the difference that you see in mortality between two sets of population. If you exercise every day and you have a muscle tissue well-developed, you have a 500-time lower probability of death at age 80 and 90. So you will see, probably in the next generation of therapies, how we paid a lot more attention to the musculoskeletal tissue and how to help individuals stay longer and feed rather than just reducing fat. So I think that from that aspect, I think we're going to see tremendous benefits.
David Sans:Cardiovascular system and cancer are still the number one and two causes of death. There is a lot of new technologies that we're going to see in cancer. The biggest opportunity that I see in cancer is probably the T-cell engagers. Nobody saw 10 years ago T-cell engagers were very difficult to manage. Nobody saw that. Basically, if you titrate, if you use T-cell engagers in a small amount at the beginning and then you increase the dose. After a week or two your body has greater tolerance and this is what happens when you design these clinical trials. It was brilliant by a clinician that saw the benefit of T-cell engagers. Every T-cell engager was failing, but they didn't realize that if you dose it in a small amount you can lower the toxicity. So we can see now a huge uptake on T-cell engagers.
David Sans:I think there is still room for cell therapies. I'm a big evangelist and I believe that there is more that we can do with cell therapies. And I think that the biggest name now is the biospecific monoclonal antibodies. They have a biospecific type of functionality. I come from the world of monoclonal antibodies and we saw already in the beginning of 2000, the biospecific was something that the FDA was already pushing at that time. Now it's becoming more and more a standard time Now it's becoming more and more a standard.
David Sans:And last but not least, the antibody drug conjugate is another class that has been phenomenal. I mean you can target tumors with a payload of toxic agents to kill only the cancer cells and preserve healthy cells. So that is something that I'm a big believer, that radiotherapeutics will become very, very interesting Novartis, for instance, is very interested in radiotherapeutics and that the conjugation of monoclonal antibodies with radiotherapeutic agents, with isotopes, will become more interesting. As of now, isotopes and radiotherapeutics have only worked with peptides because you wanted this quick release of the radiotherapeutic of the isotopes. You wanted to basically have activity in a very short period of time and then release it.
David Sans:Now we can see how this may be changing with monoclonal antibodies and an isotope that can target only the cells that you want and alpha particles that we can control better. Alpha particles is the next step in radiotherapeutics and the combination with monoclonal antibodies that can recognize only cancer cells it makes it for a game changer. They can recognize only cancer cells. It makes it for a game changer. So, as you can see, ben, there are so many that I feel very fortunate to be in the place of financing and looking at all different landscape of technologies that are truly remarkable, and the science keeps expanding. That's what I like about science. As I told you from the beginning, science is unlimited. You can always find science to do many different aspects and it provides for a lot of different investment opportunities that will be very, very successful.
Ben Comer:Yeah, and I think we could spend the rest of the show talking about any one of those therapeutic areas or modalities. You really hit the nail on the head with that on some of the ones that I've been watching and that are generating a lot of excitement. I want to try to connect two threads from your just previous comment, your just previous comment one on the patent cliff and the need for companies to bring new molecules in, you know, under their development, into their development engines. And then two, what you were saying about China.
Ben Comer:Yeah, political shifts happen during a change of administration always creates a degree of uncertainty. Given the impact of policy changes on investment activity and global economic relationships, what can you say about the kind of current and short-term future state of biotech investing in the context of China? And I guess what I'm asking is, given this need to refill pipelines and given the amount of companies you referenced in China? And then, thirdly, on top of that, the political landscape. China has become something of a watchword politically in the US. A watchword politically in the US. You know what risks and what opportunities exist for pharma companies that want to work with Chinese companies.
David Sans:It's a very difficult question and we still don't know. I mean, obviously, what we do know is that the amount of tariffs will increase, obviously, what we do know is that the amount of tariffs will increase. What we do know is that all these CDMOs that were very successful in China I mean I still chemical engineers in China to have much better. They were much better prepared than chemical engineers in Europe and it made economic sense at that time to send a lot of the manufacturing to China and a lot of pharma companies develop manufacturing in China Fast forward.
David Sans:This has created a problem of the US becoming less competitive, europe becoming less competitive and now kind of rehoming, repurposing some of the processes to go back to the US. I think it will be very difficult. We're talking about 20 years of outsourcing these technologies to China. I don't think that anybody benefits from this disruption. You saw now Wishi in China had to divest all the CDMO the clinical manufacturing business and you see a lot of US companies not being able to use these CDMOs in China anymore. So I think it's a massive dislocation in terms of corporate development.
David Sans:It makes things more difficult because, again, we have spent 20 years transferring technology to China for the benefit of production, the benefit of patients, for the benefit of creating more efficiencies. And now it's the opposite, and this is a major change. It's a big disruption. We will have to go step by step. I mean, obviously things will get more expensive, and that's. I mean obviously it doesn't favor, it's not favorable for the US to have all these expertise to be outsourced. And now it's a reset, it's a calibration of 20 years, of a trend to utilize economies of scale globally and now retrenching to nationalize and to basically bring technologies back to the US and also for European markets it's the same situation.
Ben Comer:They have to rethink the whole business model to reinvest in technologies back in Europe. What about just in terms of pure M&A of Chinese companies?
David Sans:Do you see any real risk or opportunity there? Yes, I mean, that's what we see now. These 3,000 biotech companies in China have very limited access to funding right now. This has happened in Korea. This is happening now in China. It has happened already before in Japan. These biotech companies had easier access to capital than now. Now these biotech companies cannot raise funds anymore.
David Sans:So it is the natural process for these companies to seek licensing and to seek for acquisitions here in the US and Europe. So it's not secret that big competitors of mine are setting up shop in China for the purpose of getting first hands on these assets. There are tons of assets available in China that can be developed in the US, can be developed in Europe, and there will be a problems that we encounter with a lot of clinical trials done in China is that they don't have the same protocols. They don't have the same standards of data quality. There were a lot of concerns, even with audit financials done in China. They did not come out to be the same quality or the same standards as you would expect from US companies.
Ben Comer:Right and kind of keeping on this line of funding and not specific to China. But in a previous conversation, david, you said you know science is unlimited. You know there is a and you referenced some of the most promising areas and areas that people are very excited about drug developers, patients, investors but the limiting factor, as I recall, was science is unlimited. People and money are not. So how can scientifically promising young companies in 2025 keep themselves capitalized in this environment where there's so many things to chase but an unlimited amount of people and resources available? What options kind of good, bad and ugly do they have to choose from?
David Sans:Yes, you're right, the limiting rate factor is funding and people. These are the two limiting resources. In the history of humanity, we have had this situation many times before, many times before. Remember 2002, we had limitations of funding, very expensive money. 2008, we had a big recession. So I think, as of now, there have been a lot of changes in the financial industry. There will be some difficulties, there will be a limitation of funding, so a lot of companies will need to make hard decisions and a lot of programs will need to be put on the shelf, and this has happened all the time. There will be a lot of recalibration of priorities, and this also keeps the system healthy in terms of looking for the best assets, assets that can perform, and recalibrating the areas of research and areas of funding. So I don't think it's different than we have seen in the past. We have seen this type of geographic dislocations before and it will be a good year. I mean, 2025 is a year that has been characterized as a year with a lot of opportunities good year for M&A.
Ben Comer:But thinking about smaller companies who you know maybe need to get a trial recruited, need to kick off a phase two trial, need to maybe pay someone to manufacture a larger amount of product for a larger clinical trial. You know what new options or maybe existing options are out there that you would maybe recommend or recommend against.
David Sans:Yes, I think that a lot of companies wanted to recalibrate, trim the fat, look for a lot of collaborations and try to find new ways of developing, especially manufacturing. A lot of the manufacturing is relocated to the US. The US needs to catch up with 20 years of globalization and sending manufacturing to other countries. There is still good relationship with India. India, especially the area of Hyderabad, would be one of the big winners and I think that a lot of pharma companies still have other places.
David Sans:China is not the only place and there are other places where even pharma companies have historically developed to precisely have always two or three different sides of manufacturing that are not correlated. If something happens in China, you need to have another facility in India. So definitely there's no doubt in my mind that there are many other places that business will continue. Development of manufacturing will be also done in other parts of the world that are more friendly to democracy and more respectful to the IP patent protection laws. So there will be pieces will continue. Definitely there is a disruption now because of geopolitical situations with China. This will continue with this administration for the time being and we will have to continue with more CDMOs relocated here in the US and Europe and others in other geographic areas like Mexico and India.
Ben Comer:Thinking about small biotechs in particular in the very early stages of research and development. What do you anticipate in terms of the public market situation, and are there any kind of alternative investment tools that could be useful? You know we've spoken about micro IPOs in a previous conversation.
David Sans:You know we've spoken about micro IPOs in a previous conversation. Yes, I think that the micro IPO space is a space that I personally am very strong about it. I still think that there is a lot of opportunities for companies to go public on a small amount of offerings anywhere from 10 to 15 million million offerings and are manageable. And what we have seen and I think we had this conversation before a big increase of transactions with private equity funds. I think that one of the biggest differences, one of the areas that are growing faster, are these transactions with private equity funds, with royalty funds. We have seen an increase on what we call the synthetic royalties. These are royalties before these are licensed with another commercial entity. So there are like three or four pockets of financing that are definitely different from 10 years, 20 years ago, that are growing. Different from 10 years, 20 years ago that are growing. You did not see private equity funds involved in preclinical, pre-revenue transaction and now there is something that is coming more and more. This concept of the synthetic royalty almost didn't exist 20 years ago and now you can see at least 10% of all transactions are royalty involvedinvolved royalty piece way before it goes commercial. So definitely there are more structures that we see of interest.
David Sans:We see a lot of structure financing with warrants that when the stock goes up and you have good data, all of a sudden you can realize a very good transaction with the warrants you already have. If you have $8 million now in warrants and your stock goes up because you have good data on a phase two trial, it's a fantastic day because you can monetize this data. The company can waste money, investors may do well and definitely I'm a big believer that there is a room for this type of transaction. When I talk to CEOs, they don't like warrants for all the good reasons, but at the same time it provides a structure financing that when things go well and if you believe you're a strong believer on that legal trial to be successful, then you can have a very successful situation with rising the stock or the price of the stock and allowing to monetize all these warrants.
David Sans:So I think that we will see to your point. We'll see more structured deals with different instruments. Warrants are not going to go away. We'll see a lot of transactions with this kind of warrants and it's a space that is rapidly moving. I think within the next 24 months the price of money will get more expensive. The rule need to have more structured deals in place.
Ben Comer:Can you give us a read at all on the private equity investment strategy? And I guess what I'm thinking about is is there a kind of herd mentality where private equity is attracted to a certain size and even a therapeutic area, or is it sort of all over the map at this point?
David Sans:Yes, I mean in private equity. You see a lot of transactions that a lot of companies can raise two, three, $400 million in series A, b and C and this is happening every day. I mean, we just saw an artificial intelligence company led by Arch Ventures in Chicago. They raised $1 billion. So you see transactions now that I never saw before on the private equity space and VC private equity space that are very deep pockets. They can deploy tons and tons of funding. A lot of transactions now that I didn't anticipate 10 years ago are actually private placements Series A, series B, Series C that you can deploy easily $100 to $100 million.
Ben Comer:And as someone who likes to work with CEOs, likes to advise CEOs and this may be an impossible question to answer because the facts in any given case will differ from one to the next but are there things that would advise a CEO who is kind of, you know, as a very promising early stage development candidate needs to move into, say, a phase two trial? Are there any particular instruments that you would really caution on or just do an extra degree of due diligence on before recommending that as an option to a CEO or not?
David Sans:I think that every time I talk to CEOs, I try to bring a perspective in terms of the competitive landscape. I always spend time with the CEOs to give them a landscape, leave them compatibles. I think that it's very important for CEOs to understand where they are, understand what is the landscape and have a reality check on their compatibles, on the valuations, and I think that this will be more and more the case that we will need to look at the compatibles. We need to look at the valuation and for companies to have a reality check in terms of where to continue investing and when to give up, when to basically not abandon an asset but to have the courage not to continue with a certain asset or certain type of therapeutic areas. Your question was mostly about what type of structures to avoid. I think that an early stage, you want to avoid any type of debt. In other words, debt most of the times becomes an espial death. No-transcript.
Ben Comer:Excellent, David. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. Are there any final thoughts that you would like to share that perhaps you think are important for our listeners to think about and that maybe I haven't asked you about?
David Sans:Yes, I think that, moving forward, I think that what we're going to see is more collaboration among different banks. I think that we see in the financial industry where we collaborate and you see more and more transactions where you have two or three, four, even five banks involved. So I think that moving forward, we are going to see more and more of these collaborative type of efforts, more than sharp elbows to basically hold on to your own transaction. I think that we all benefit from working together. The more collaborative we are, the more we can do well for our clients, for investors. We can do more transactions. So I look forward to 2025 to do more collaborative type of transactions and to meet as many new technologies as we can.
Ben Comer:That's David Sands, head of Healthcare and Life Sciences Investment Banking at D Boral Capital. I'm Ben Comer and you've just listened to the Business of Biotech. Sands, head of healthcare and life sciences investment banking at D Boral Capital. I'm Ben Comer and you've just listened to the Business of Biotech. Find us and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and be sure to check out new weekly video casts of these conversations every Monday under the listen and watch tab at lifescienceleadercom. We'll see you next week and thank you for listening.
