Vibe Bio Newsletter — March 2025
Every Cure for Every Community — The Role of AI in Drug Development Decision-Making
Thanks for reading Vibe Bio’s Monthly Newsletter! Stay up-to-date with insights into the biotech landscape and the latest from our team in our pursuit of every cure for every community.
Industry updates & resources
Endpoint News | With tariffs on the way, generic drugmaking woes could hinder Trump’s reshoring plan
Vibe Bio | The Great Disruption: how Chinese assets will reshape drug development
Biotech 2050 Podcast | How Family Offices Quietly Fuel Biotech’s Boldest Innovations
Endpoint News | Johnson & Johnson earmarks $55B to boost US capacity
Vibe Bio | Pharma portfolio analytics in a gen AI world - Vibe Bio
Biotech 2050 Podcast | Bridging Biotech’s Funding Gap & Investing for Impact
Fierce Biotech | GSK takes advantage of natural experiment to study whether shingles vaccine can reduce dementia risk
Monthly rewind
March Q&A: Chinese biotechs and assets in biopharma
Increasingly, Chinese assets are playing a big role in the biopharmaceutical industry. As Chinese biotech companies and research programs emerge as significant players, what will be the impact in the U.S. market?
Common questions about this evolving sector include:
How does the US biopharma community perceive Chinese biotechs & assets?
What opportunities are emerging for US biopharmas seeking to in-license Chinese assets?
Is language a significant barrier impacting the evaluation of these assets?
What are the risks on the horizon?
As Chinese biotechs continue expanding their global footprint, US biopharma companies must be prepared to assess both the opportunities and challenges of in-licensing these promising assets quickly. With drug development becoming increasingly global, staying ahead requires market awareness and leveraging technology to accelerate the discovery of new treatments.
Read this blog post to get answers to these questions from an expert in the field.
Portfolio prioritization:
As pharma companies seek to identify the right AI partners to improve the portfolio prioritization decision-making process, the focus is on finding solutions that can deliver on those promises.
Here’s a helpful framework to consider when thinking about portfolio analytics:
Go beyond public know-how: choose an AI solution designed with life sciences know-how AND one that has been pressure-tested in relevant capital allocation scenarios.
Confirm dynamic range: choose an AI solution that offers executive-level concision but can also go deep credibly with an experienced drug hunter, so you can be confident in your team’s decisions.
Evaluate configurability: customize the AI for your team’s strategy, strengths, and risk framework. Without this ability, you’ll lack the context needed to make informed decisions.
Ensure explainability: all insights must be attributed back to the original datapoint or source, so when you go deep, you can confirm the recommendations yourself.
If you are an active drug developer or biotech investor and interested in learning how to optimize your portfolio decision-making process, let’s embark on this journey together. Vibe Bio is here to support your pipeline analysis and portfolio analysis goals. Learn how we can help.
What we’re hearing:
As Vibe Bio continues to grow and build out the capabilities of its AI-powered drug program analysis platform, we continue to speak with many companies in the pharmaceutical industry. In one recent call with a biotech company focused on complement biology, the team shared some of their group’s pain points and needs:
We need a systematic way to evaluate 400-450 assets or opportunities
Our current process is manual and resource intensive
One significant challenge is finding hidden opportunities others have missed
We have limited bandwidth for deep scientific diligence
How can we address these pains and still achieve 10% growth long-term through pipeline additions?
As we talked through these pain points and needs, one thing became clear — the interest in AI analysis is there, but they need to be able to trust the outputs. Having explainability and the ability to dig into the data is important for teams seeking to leverage AI for program analysis. These capabilities could help them trust AI to find unique insights in complement biology and achieve the growth goals they’re working to achieve.
What’s Coming Soon
Coming up April 7th-8th, we’ll be at the Chief Medical Officer Summit 360°, the largest gathering of physicians in biotech. Join us at the Vibe Bio Cafe in the Hancock Room at the Hilton Boston Park Plaza from 7-9 AM on April 7 to talk about AI innovation in drug development.
Product Update
We recently rolled out the ability to incorporate publicly available web sources into drug analyses in VibeOne, cutting down data curation time by more than 50%. This enables much faster, high-level research of external programs, which can be compiled into competitive landscapes or any other externally-oriented analysis.
In the coming months, we'll be rolling out report composition tools, allowing you to programmatically create any sort of analysis you need. Our robust VibeOne analysis queries and modules can be assembled into custom outputs on top of your own internal program data—and can now be buttressed with public external data as well.
Inside the Vibe Bio Team
If you’ve read our newsletter before, you already know we use Discord (Slack’s gamer cousin). It helps our distributed team stay connected, share interesting biopharma industry news, coordinate on internal and external projects, and collaborate. One of our favorite channels is #animals, where team members share pics of their kids, their pets, and anything else that takes their fancy!
Recently, Christina Wong, our fearless head of marketing, shared pics of her trip to Domenica, where she went scuba diving (and much more) in polarsteps, a cool travel app. Here are just a few of them:
Listening to every community
Community building is a top priority for us! Learn about how we're driving our mission to find every cure for every disease and join the conversation! Follow us on social media to stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates from our community.
Tell us what else you’d like to see in future editions of the newsletter. We’d love to hear from you!
Sincerely,
The Vibe Bio Team
#EveryCureforEveryCommunity