You win some, you lose some — that’s the risk of trying to predict the next hot biotechs.
Since 2018, the Endpoints 11 awards have identified startups with the right ingredients to become a great drug developer. And ahead of this year’s awards, we’re looking at our past picks to see how they’ve fared (and how we’ve done choosing).
On Thursday, we’ll gather in Boston to unveil our next group of 11 exciting companies that we think have the science, money and people to be successful.
Thirteen of our picks (that we know of) have laid off workers. Seven of the private biotechs have announced additional funding rounds. More than a handful have inked pharma collaborations.
In a sign of how volatile this industry can be, one prior winner, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, went from having a drug on the market to pulling it and going back to R&D work. And one of last year’s honorees became a commercial-stage outfit after Indian regulators approved Immuneel’s cell therapy Qartemi for lymphoma earlier this year.
Another 2023 winner, Maze Therapeutics, struck an early-stage drug licensing deal with Sanofi — only to see it blocked by the Federal Trade Commission. But it quickly found a new buyer for its Pompe disease medicine in Japan’s Shionogi.
What isn’t surprising is that almost a third of the companies we’ve profiled since 2018 are still preclinical. Drug development takes years, and we try to pick startups early in their life cycle that are often working on cutting-edge science.
The good news: None of our picks have shuttered since last year’s awards, despite the difficult backdrop that the industry continued to weather. (Only two of the 55 have closed up shop, and both did so in the spring of 2023, in the worst of the biotech downturn.)