BB Biotech's net profit fell in the first half of 2021 due to turbulent financial markets, but it gave a cautious but quite promising outlook until the end of the year.
Swiss investment company BB Biotech, one of the world's largest biotech investors, posted a first-half net profit of 349 million Swiss francs ($389 million), down 17 percent year on year, it said in a statement Friday.
The fall in the second quarter was much greater to 129 million francs from 1.18 billion a year earlier.
High Volatility
BB Biotech said the reason for the huge drop was high stock market volatility, which left its mark on growth stocks in particular.
It added that the economic recovery had led to short-term inflationary signals, raising investors' concerns about interest rate hikes and leading to significant outflows from growth sectors.
Outlook for Second Half
Looking ahead ot the second half, the company said it was eying await the Biden administration’s announcement of a new Food and Drug Administration commissioner candidate. Another focus point influencing investors might arise from the outcome of the initiatives by the U.S. administration to limit drug prices.
BB Biotech added that investors would likely monitor the launch of Biogen’s Aduhelm treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
More recently, high expectations on Wall Street about the performance of gene editing companies had left some valuations behind, it added.
Marked by Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic would continue to dominate the second half. with scientists and health experts carefully monitoring the emergence of virus variants.
Vaccines already approved and widely used would be tested for their efficacy against new strains. Most importantly, booster injections were being developed consisting of a third injection to boost the immune system of they already vaccinated or to be tailored specifically to address the challenging emergent strains, the company said.
AI Use
BB Biotech pointed to an accelerating and continued increase in data generated within the biopharma industry and academia, which is further fueled by a convergence with information technology and computational capabilities.
It said its investment team intended to exploit this trend and was expanding advanced analytics, artificial intelligence capabilities and underlying data infrastructure.
«We believe that the democratization of cloud computing in recent years enables our team to make use of large patient-centric datasets to guide investment decisions,» BB Biotech said.
