Advocating for Advanced Therapies:Another Significant Year Ahead for the Regenerative Medicine Sector

摘要

My sense is that we've come a long way and that 2013 was actually a very good year — perhaps maybe even the best year ever for regenerative medicines and advanced therapies. Clearly the financial markets have allowed us to do more in terms of raisingcapital to fund projects in this space, and we are seeing a growing interest in the sector in the investor community.We've seen a number of major financing events over the course of the past year, and we've seen the IPO market become an opportunity for companies to access new groups of investors to an extent that it never has been before. We just came off a panel [at the Phacilitate conference, see box below] where the bluebird bio IPO (www.bluebirdbio.com) was a major point of discussion. That financing came together in ways that simply couldn't have happened just a few years ago. You could argue that the market conditions played a large role in this, but the company did an excellent job putting together the pieces that allowed it to go out and raise money, benefiting from solid management and the closure of timely and significant deals. Establishing a global strategic collaboration with Celgene Corporation in March 2013 was especially important in positioning bluebird bio for a successful IPO. The company is working toward novel, disease-altering gene therapies in oncology by using a patient's own genetically modified T cells — chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells — to selectively target and destroy cancer cells.