Guests: Pete Bak and Christian Thienel

Length: 27 minutes

In this episode of The Life Science Report, Dr. Pete Bak and Back Bay Director, Christian Thienel catch up on the area attracting the most industry interest over the past couple of years: the anti-obesity space.

From big players looking to capitalize on the renewed interest in the obesity space to the staggering success of Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound) for glycemic control and weight loss, there’s a lot to cover.

Topics in this podcast include:

• A brief introduction to glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonists
• Why GLP-1s’ popularity is skyrocketing as treatment for type 2 diabetes and obesity
• How amylin and petrelintide (a long-acting amylin analogue) are being newly re-imagined for the obesity space, as well as muscle-targeted approaches like myostatin and activins
• Where BD and investor interest lies as these drugs are expected to have north of $150B in sales annually within the next decade
• What’s happening in early to late-stage drug development
• What the future holds for this sector, possibly to include cannabinoid one receptor inverse agonists and mitochondrial targets for metabolic disease

As always, thank you for joining us. Did you know we welcome listener questions? If there any areas you’d like us to explore further in metabolic disease and obesity, please let us know. Submit your questions here. Our Nordic-American Healthcare Conference 2025 will feature metabolic track. Learn more: https://nordicamericanhealthcareconference.com/

You can find previous episodes of the podcast here.

Welcome to another episode with the DNB//Back Bay Partnership for Healthcare.

In this episode Jonathan Gertler, Back Bay CEO and Managing Partner, is once again joined by James Cirenza, Head of Fixed Income and Equities at DNB, Kristoffer Braaten, Director of US Equity Capital Markets at DNB, and Vasilios Kofitsas, Managing Director of Investment Banking at Back Bay Life Science Advisors, to talk about current market dynamics and the 2024 IPO outlook in the US and in Europe.

Topics in this podcast include:

• Trends, cycles and the current state of capital markets in Europe and the US
• IPO performance for Q1 2024 vs. previous years
• Top characteristics of companies well-suited to go public and be successful
• IPO market dynamics in Europe vs. the US
• Expectations and advice for companies contemplating going public

As always we welcome listener questions and/or topics you’d like to learn more about.

You can listen to previous episodes here or submit your inquiries to info@bblsa.com.

Learn more about the DNB//Back Bay Partnership and read our disclaimers at https://www.bblsa.com/dnb-back-bay-partnership.

Guests: Pete Bak and Christian Thienel

Length: 37 minutes

With the advent of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, we saw a tremendous amount of interest in not only COVID vaccines, but other companies riding the tailwind and developing vaccine therapies that span across viral illness, maternal infections and bacterial infections.

In this episode resident immunologist Dr. Pete Bak and Christian Thienel discuss vaccine technology, up-and-coming areas of interest, such as RSV, and the vaccines currently in late-stage clinical development.

Topics in this podcast include:

• Vaccine technology, vaccine types and their varying levels of durability
• The ongoing interest of vaccine development for RSV, including data from GSK’s Arexvy and Pfizer’s Abrysvo vaccines
• How recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) influence commercial dynamics
• The interesting chess game of scheduling vaccines as they relate to COVID, flu and RSV (seasonality versus strains and antigens)
• Vaccine development and data as it applies to Cytomegalovirus (CMV) and Epstein-Barr (EBV)
• News from the bacterial front: MinervaX leading the way with a maternal vaccine against Group B streptococcus infections with a very large series B round for $54M; Pfizer’s recent Prevnar 20 against pneumococcal pneumonia
• Pricing, reimbursement and the interplay with ACIP guidelines

As always, we welcome listener questions and/or topics you’d like to learn more about.

You can listen to previous episodes here or submit your inquiries here.