硅谷银行-医疗保健投资和退出（英）

Published January 7, 2025Reach out to your SVB point of contact to gain access to the full version of the report.Report PreviewAI doesn’t change the fact that establishing therapeutic effectiveness in human beings remains unpredictable and time-consuming. If bigger, deeper datasets are the Holy Grail for AI companies, tools to improve and accelerate clinical trials are the Holy Grail for biotech.”HEALTHCARE INVESTMENTS & EXITS | ANNUAL REPORT 20242Another year begins, and so we bring you our Healthcare Investments and Exits 2024 report. After a few years of uncertainty and noise, we’re starting to get signals about where healthcare innovation is headed over the next 10 years.Biopharma AI is the story of 2024. Overall investment in the space has exploded, despite the headwinds still facing the innovation economy. The biggest impacts of AI in life science and biotech are still emerging. Clinical trials are a long, difficult process. A new drug candidate found today won’t be available as a product for at least five years. That means that investors wanting to be on the cutting edge of commercial AI biotech later this decade need to be investing now. The success of AI companies in attracting investment, even in an environment insisting that companies demonstrate real value and results, shows the priority investors are placing on long-term transformation in biopharma. The first entirely AI-designed drugs are moving through clinical trials that started in 2020. With readouts of the earliest drugs coming up, 2025 will be a long-awaited “prove-it” year for AI drug discovery. One of the most exciting use cases for AI is in novel protein development. Venture funding to the AI-driven protein design space has skyrocketed alongside a shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry driven by work at the Institute for Protein Design and at Google DeepMind. The jump was mostly driven by a mammoth $1B Series A round given to Xaira, a company that’s been in existence for less than two years. Is there something bigger than a mega-deal? The possibilities of these new protein tools are impressive. It’s increasingly realistic to envision custom-built antibodies or DNA/RNA binding proteins that would create astonishingly powerful anti-cancer and other treatments. We take a deeper look at the AI protein space in our Biotech AI spotlight.On the always-top-of-mind exit front, a backlog of late-stage companies are holding on, waiting for signals and a more friendly market to emerge. A handful of companies has already filed for IPOs in 2025, and decent performances from companies that debuted in 2024 should build confidence. If the big IPOs of early 2025 are successes, more are in the wings. Prospects for the M&A market are murkier. The overall impression is that buyers and investors are all waiting to see what the next few quarters bring. The federal government has immense influence in how life science and healthcare progresses. We don’t know what the new administration will bring, but we