2022 is an eventful year in terms of restructuring the global biomedical industry. Many major pharmaceutical companies are benefiting from the huge demand for pandemic prevention brought about by COVID-19, and have generated impressive revenues from vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and products related to testing equipment. This is why they continue to allocate funds to further R&D investments in 2022, or to reorganize their product lines through licensing, strategic alliances, and mergers and acquisitions.
Global biotech M&A market in 2022 experienced its slowest pace since 2018, with a downward trend in terms of both the number of deals and transaction amounts. According to statistics from PwC as of mid-November 2022, the number of deals in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector in 2022 is 266, marking a 28% decrease compared to 2021, and the total deal value is $137 billion, registering a 49% reduction from the previous year. Nonetheless, this does not necessarily mean that the global biotech investment market is shrinking. The largest biotech M&A deal of the year comes at the end of 2022 - Amgen’s $27.8 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company that focuses on treatments for rare autoimmune diseases.