Industry Outlook 2025: Looking at the Investment Environment

When reflecting on trends that shaped the bio/pharma industry in 2024, Miguel Forte, president of International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT), board member of Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics, explains that the investment environment has been his primary thought. “Investment is the oil that gets everything moving and enables us to do the process development, the work, and the product development in the end,” he says.

While investment has been tough over recent years, Forte asserts that there was a slight pick-up in activity during 2024, albeit at a slow pace. “We also saw people looking into different opportunities,” he continues, “[which] in a way is telling us that companies are finding different ways of funding so that they can continue their activities.”

Moving into 2025, Forte anticipates that industry will witness two kinds of M&A: one being activity between similar-sized companies that will combine for synergistic reasons and to optimize costs, and the other being straight acquisitions that will take a technology into Big Pharma and accelerate the development of a therapy to the patient-level. “We're going to obviously be impacted by these bigger acquisitions, because it's bigger value, and we see the value of Big Pharma really taking these products to patients,” he adds. “But in the background, there's going to be a series of smaller deals that will have that synergizing ability, bringing two companies of similar size together with broader geographic scope, broader equity story proposition, and that's what we're going to see.”

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About the speaker

Miguel Forte, president of International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, board member of Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics

Miguel Forte is president of International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, board member of Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics—a company developing engineered cell therapies for inflammatory diseases. Miguel holds an MD and a Specialist in Infectious Diseases from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, a PhD in Immunology from the University of Birmingham, and a certificate on Health Technology Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. Additionally, he is Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the RCP in the UK.