Dr. Fran Brown, SVP of Drug Development Science at Certara, joins this episode of CertaraTalks to share highlights from J.P. Morgan’s BiotechShowcase 2024. Watch below for insights and key takeaways around topics like the current funding environment, the role of generative AI in the regulatory processes, and advancements in cancer medicine.
Transcript:
Hello. I’m doctor Suzanne Minton. I’m a director of content strategy at Certara, and you’re watching Certara Talks. Today, I’m here with my colleague, doctor Fran Brown. Fran, would you like to introduce yourself?
Certainly. Hi, Suzanne. I’m Fran Brown. I’m the senior vice president of drug development science here at Certara.
Fantastic. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I hear that you just came back at the beginning of the month from a local Bay Area event JP Morgan Biotech Showcase, so I thought we could talk about that a little bit.
Left too. Fantastic. So this conference is really well known for being a place that emerging biotechs go to seek funding from the investor community. Can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts on what the funding environment seems to be?
Yes. There was a a, you know, a lot of interest in the the current funding environment.
Listening to some of the the talks and discussing with some of the people we met there.
There’s been an increase of merger and aqua missions towards the end of two thousand and twenty three and definitely in early January. There was a lot of announcements at the the conference of of mergers.
So that space looks like it’s picking up. More important for some of the small biotechs that we work with is the venture capital, funding environment and there’s some cautious optimism that that will actually improve especially towards the end of end of the year, maybe from mid year onwards. So the cautious optimism is how I would put it.
Excellent. Well, that’s that’s encouraging to hear. As everyone knows, AI was a big theme in twenty twenty three, and I I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. Did you have some takeaways on what people were saying about AI at this event?
Yes. I mean, like everywhere else in the globe. It was a a very hot topic.
There was a lot of discussion about sort of concrete examples around the use of AI, in areas such as discovery areas such as target identification, and compound design. There was also, you know, a lot of interest in its potential use in other areas.
Especially using generative AI, in the regulatory writing space to piece efficiencies.
It’s very exciting.
Another area that it’s certainly not new is oncology, but we are always seeing out seeing new advances and new trends in the field of of cancer medication. Can you comment on that?
Yeah. It was interesting. I mean, oncology is such a huge area that there’s there’s interest over a large range of both tumor types as well as treatment modalities. This year, there seem to be, a concentration in interest around, anti body drug conjugates, voice seeing a lot of deals being done for, partnering in that space.
You know, they offer unique development challenges as far as we’re concerned, and they really lend themselves to a model informed drug development approach.
Excellent. One last question for you.
A big news item in twenty twenty three was that we saw the emergence of GLP one receptor agonists for the treatment of obesity. I’m sure that this was a big topic at JP Morgan. What were folks saying?
It’s it was a really hot topic. There was a lot of interest. I mean, the data that have come out for weight loss around the particularly impressive.
It’ll be interesting to see how those pan out on a long term basis.
It’s also interesting to see how the combination clip kit and clip with glick and up glickagon, will compete against those clip and agonists.
The market itself is very crowded, and it’s really, really gonna be very hard for people coming with programs that are coming behind to differentiate themselves.
And internally, that’s where we our clinical outcome databases to really be able to help companies benchmark the early clinical data with with currently approved medications, looking at the the long term productivity.
Fantastic. Well, it sounds like it was a great conference.
It was great.
Excellent. Excellent. Great way to start twenty twenty four, and it was a pleasure talking with you Fran. If you’re interested in the work that doctor Brown Brown and her team do, you can visit us at Certara.com to learn more. I’m Suzanne Minton. You’ve been watching Certara talks. I’ll see you next time.
