RTW Biotech Opportunities Ltd ($RTW)

Earnings Call Transcript · March 30, 2026

LSE GB Financials Capital Markets Earnings Calls 41 min

Highlights from the call

In the fiscal year ending December 2025, RTW Biotech Opportunities Ltd reported a notable 36% increase in NAV per share, signaling a strong recovery from the previous four-year bear market in biotech. The company highlighted its ability to outperform key indices, with a 23% annualized net return since inception, significantly surpassing the Russell 2000 Biotech Index and the NASDAQ Biotech Index. Management expressed optimism about the future, citing improved market conditions and a wave of maturing innovation in the sector, while the discount to NAV decreased from 23% to 12%.

Main topics

  • Strong NAV Growth: RTW's NAV per share grew by approximately 36% in 2025, outperforming the NASDAQ Biotech Index and aligning closely with the Russell 2000 Biotech Index. Management stated, "2025 was a great year for RTW Bio and for biotech more broadly."
  • Market Recovery: The company noted that the latter part of 2025 marked the end of a four-year bear market for biotech, with public equities responding positively. Management indicated that "biotech outperformed broader equity markets" for the first time in years.
  • Investment Strategy: RTW emphasized its full life cycle investment strategy, which has allowed it to capture significant value across public and private investments. They noted, "We believe strongly that full life cycle investing is really valuable to maximizing the value that you can capture in the sector."
  • M&A Activity: The management highlighted a surge in M&A activity, stating that 2025 matched the highest year for $1 billion-plus acquisitions in biotech history. They noted, "Deals accelerate, especially in the fall as U.S. policy risk declined."
  • IPO Market Outlook: Management expressed optimism for the IPO market in 2026, suggesting it could be the first normal year for IPOs in several years, with expectations of "somewhere north of 20 IPOs".

Key metrics mentioned

  • NAV per Share Growth: 36% (vs previous year, significant recovery after four years of decline)
  • Annualized Return Since IPO: 23% (outperformed Russell 2000 Biotech Index (55%) and NASDAQ Biotech Index (69%))
  • Discount to NAV: 12% (down from 23% at the end of 2024)
  • New Private Investments: 7 (included in a diverse portfolio strategy)
  • M&A Activity: highest year for $1 billion-plus acquisitions (matched previous record, indicating strong market activity)
  • Expected IPOs in 2026: 20+ (first normal IPO year anticipated after several years of low activity)

RTW Biotech Opportunities Ltd's strong performance in 2025, marked by significant NAV growth and a positive outlook for the biotech sector, supports a bullish investment thesis. However, the uncertainty surrounding FDA leadership and regulatory changes poses risks that investors should monitor closely. Continued M&A activity and a recovering IPO market could serve as catalysts for further growth.

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

Operator
#1

Good morning, and welcome to the RTW Biotech Opportunities Limited Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Oliver Kenyon, Senior Director of Business and Corporate Development. Good morning.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#2

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for this presentation of the annual results for RTW Biotech Opportunities through the end of December 2025. I'm Oli Kenyon, Director of Business Development at RTW. I'm joined by our Founder and CIO, Rod Wong. 2025 was a great year for RTW Bio, and I'd like to dive straight in. Before that, I'd encourage you all to submit questions either via the Q&A function here or via e-mail to [email protected], and we'll address these questions following the results presentation. Since our founding in 2009, RTW has grown into a leading life sciences investment platform with about $9 billion in assets under management as of year-end. Our global footprint spans New York, London and Shanghai with a team of 80 professionals deeply embedded in the ecosystems that we invest in. At the heart of our approach is deep research-led investing. We focus on identifying and supporting world-class companies that are developing truly transformative therapies, assets that have the potential to significantly improve patients' lives. We're full life cycle investors. That means that we can build and invest in companies along the spectrum of early development through to commercialization, providing capital, expertise and long-term support. This strategy has delivered strong and consistent results. Our flagship funds have generated a 23% annualized net return over the more than 15 years that it's been in existence. We're making significant investments in our team, technology and our full life cycle capabilities, and we're confident that we'll maintain our ability to deliver exceptional returns for investors in the years ahead. RTW Bio continues to outperform over the medium to long term and has delivered markedly greater value to shareholders than other similar exposures. Shareholders who invested at IPO have received a 136% NAV return ahead of the 55% delivered by the Russell 2000 Biotech Index, the 69% delivered by the NASDAQ Biotech Index and the 29% of the AIC biotechnology and health care sector. On an annualized basis since IPO, RTW Bio's NAV has delivered an almost 15% return per annum. That's about double what those biotech indices have returned and 3 to 4x the return of the AIC sector. That material level of alpha versus indices and the sector has been delivered concurrently with a 4-year biotech bear market. I'm pleased to say that the latter stages of 2025 saw a reversal of that and for the first time in 4 years, biotech outperformed broader equity markets. We're very excited about what the future holds. And now I'd like to hand over to Rod to discuss performance over the year and what's next for biotech and your company. Rod?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#3

Thanks, Oli. Hi, everybody. So first, starting with performance. Over last year, RTW's NAV per share grew by about 36%. That's ahead of the NASDAQ Biotech Index, behind the Russell 2000 Biotech Index, which is the small cap heavy and then ahead of all of our AIC sector peers of 18%. Over the 3 and 5 years since IPO in 2019, Bio's performance has been ahead of them all. So last year, the public book contributed the lion's share, is largely driven by 4 public acquisitions in addition to a couple of IPOs. Our private investments were roughly flat. We did make 7 new private investments. Given that 2025, as Oli mentioned, marked the end of this 4-year bear market in biotech, it's not surprising that public equities responded first. We did see some modest NAV accretion as well from our buyback program. All right. So on this slide, big picture, you see some of the driving themes. They are late-stage development companies and commercial stage companies representing the bulk. It's consistent with an industry where innovation is not only growing, but also importantly maturing. These are not early-stage platform companies. Winners on the left, Avidity was acquired by Novartis for a record $12 billion for a development stage company. PTC got approval for a rare disease called PKU and showed a strong first quarter of launch. And then Stoke demonstrated very positive data and 80% reduction in seizures in the most common cause of inherited seizures in kids, disease called Dravet syndrome. On the right side, the losers, Rocket, a Danon patient in its clinical trial tragically passed away. The trial was paused as a result to find a path forward. That trial now has restarted this year. Dyne, we're including this for completeness, but is actually a pair trade with Avidity. And then finally, CARGO failed the Phase III clinical trial in cancer. On the private side, we did have a couple of exits. Alcyone was acquired by Biogen in September. This was for $85 million and the upfront cash payment represented a roughly 240% uplift from where we had the position marked. The private portfolio remains in good shape. You can see over 80% of our private names have more than 1 year of cash on their balance sheets. All right. We're sometimes asked whether exposure to privates is actually additive to returns overall. We believe strongly that full life cycle investing is really valuable to maximizing the value that you can capture in the sector. So here, we've decomposed the sources of returns for RTW Bio since the IPO. These charts show the NAV contribution in a couple of different ways. One bucket is investments that we've always held as public companies, you can see that in blue. And then two, investments that are currently private or were first held as private companies, but have since gone public, and then we held on to those positions, and that you see in green. So what you see from this is that over the medium to long term, private investing gives this unique opportunity to get to know science and management much more deeply than you would have otherwise, which then helps improve decision-making down the road when companies are publicly traded. In contrast, a private-only strategy could likely not have delivered these returns as a lot of the returns come in the public portion of the life cycle. And for many private-focused investors, they would need to be sold shortly after going public. All right. So as we've talked about, the sector finally emerged from a record-setting bear market last year. Now it was a bumpy road to get to that and largely because of policy uncertainty with the second Trump administration. Just to recap, there are 3 buckets of risk that were introduced with the new administration and then they were resolved in order. First was FDA, a question of new leadership's philosophy and the fears that with turnover, the FDA would cease the function. Turned out not to be the case, and the new leadership reiterated their support for innovation broadly and their goal to accelerate it. Number two, manufacturing reshoring-related tariffs with Trump's goal of bringing manufacturing for drugs back to the states. That ended with majority of pharmas committing to reshore nearly $400 billion in manufacturing. And then finally, number three, most favored nation or MFN drug pricing, which was resolved in the fall with the creation of a new direct-to-consumer pathway for patients that lack insurance. Now I should note that towards the end of the year in Q4, FDA instability was reintroduced. There was turnover in the leaders for the 2 main drug divisions at FDA, CDER and CBER. But we think this time, the new uncertainty, the impact should be largely focused in nichier areas, specifically rare disease, gene and cell therapy, touch a little bit more on that, I believe, on the next slide. All right. So you see the results in the upper right-hand chart that despite these FDA issues, the number of new drugs that ultimately got approved last year was okay, largely in line with the last couple of years. We guesstimate that versus previous FDA leadership, you probably got a few less drugs last year that you could count on one hand. Now the main new issue now that has emerged is FDA, especially the CBER division, which regulates biologics and the newer modalities for rare disease, they have been taking a more conservative position on the use of certain methods to run clinical trials, the use of single-arm trials, the use of natural history data and just in general, being more strict on statistical methods. Now that has impacted rare diseases and novel modalities, as I mentioned, like gene and cell therapy. There is an opportunity now to put new leadership in place, and we'll see how that changes things over the course of this year. All right. So we've been asked with the recovery last year and strong sector performance, did you miss it? We would frame it this way. There was a record 4 years of underperformance until last year and new bull market cycles aren't resolved in a single year. In fact, as most folks know, bull market cycles tend to be significantly longer than bear market cycles. One metric that we like to follow is fund flows. Last year, they were actually still negative overall because of the policy uncertainty over the bulk of the year. And even though they were positive the last few months of the year and so far early this year, our sense is that capital that has been on the sidelines is now finally just starting to return to the space. All right. Looking at how the IPO market is doing. Last year, the secondary market recovered, but the IPO market stayed basically closed. There was only 6 IPOs. In contrast, there's already 6 so far this year. Performance overall has been good, and you've had 2 standout IPOs, one up 75% roughly and the other over 100%. We participated in one of these. We had Aktis Oncology, which actually was the first IPO of the year. We do expect that this will be the first normal IPO year in several, which would imply somewhere north of 20 IPOs. Now the big caveat, of course, is the Iran war and how that evolves over time. All right. Last year was also a big year for M&A. Deals accelerate, especially in the fall as U.S. policy risk declined. In the end, it matched the highest year in the post mega merger days, delivering the largest number of $1 billion-plus tuck-in acquisitions in the history of the industry. Bigger deals were largely late-stage development and early commercial stage companies. They were really across a range of therapeutic areas for the biggest deals. For example, Intra-Cellular was in psych, Verona in respiratory, Metsera and Akero in metabolic; Merus, cancer; and then Avidity in RNA medicines and rare disease. You also did see some sizable MedTech acquisitions as well, Inari. It's an atherectomy company. And actually, this year, you've seen a couple of big deals as well in MedTech, Boston Scientific for Penumbra. That's one of ours for $15 billion. And then Danaher, $10 billion for Masimo, also one of ours. That one, proxy just came out, and it was a competitive deal. All right. I think probably most of this audience understands very well that we are in the early stages of a high patent expiry period for large-cap pharma over the next handful of years. For example, Merck because of KEYTRUDA's patent expiry. And then as well, you have Roche and Pfizer and Bristol with pretty significant needs as well. The new dynamic that people may be less familiar with is the emergence of the obesity companies, of course, Eli Lilly and Novo, adding really a record amount of cash flows to the industry overall and therefore, capacity for M&A. We estimate that over the next few years, M&A capacity, because of obesity, will increase by north of 30%. All right. Shifting gears a little bit to talk about some of the megatrends in the space. Probably the most important message and the most important megatrend is that this innovation boom that we've been in is not only accelerating, but is now translating into revenues. So the industry is growing up. One metric we like to look at is the cohort of emerging $50 billion market cap companies. You have some significant new entrants, which is extraordinarily rare in our business. So UCB, argenx, Alnylam, BeOne and Insmed are collectively growing their top lines north of 30% per year over the next couple of years at least. And there are others that have the potential to join this group, companies like RevMed and Abivax that both had kind of high-profile M&A rumors around them this year. So we think this improved growth profile for the leaders of the industry should attract rotation from generalist growth investors, hopefully from tech at some point. All right. China is another extraordinarily important megatrend. Their emergence is materially increasing the productivity of innovation. They are now already the #2 source of early-stage drug assets. In some ways, their ecosystem has some lessons for the U.S., is superior in terms of the ability to iterate on existing or popular mechanisms. They can do it cheaper and faster. They can take several compounds into the clinic and see which one is best. As a firm, we think we're well positioned for both the opportunity and the risk that come with China's emergence. We've been covering China for over half a dozen years now, relatively deeply. We have a deep understanding of the market. Eight of our investment team members are fluent Chinese speakers and some are located in China. Most importantly for us, we think, is to assess the impact of Chinese competitors to the competitive landscape for U.S. players. We think now it's absolutely required to be able to make good Western investments. We also do see, though, the opportunity to license Chinese assets to start global new companies. You see it on the top row. We've already done that multiple times. We are one of the most active venture capital firms doing this. For example, some of the names that we talked about within RTW Bio in terms of our private investments are exactly following this theme. For example, Corxel and Kailera, our next-generation obesity assets based on Chinese innovation. All right. So look at a high level at the current portfolio. We summarize exposures in 3 buckets, as you know, public, private and our royalties. Publics have grown a bit in terms of exposure. They're now 71% of NAV. Private investments are 24%. A majority of these companies that are the most interesting are close to being IPO-ready. We did make 7 new investments, as I mentioned, last year, in particular, through our new co-creation team. We expect the pace of company creation to continue to increase for us as our teams have matured and become much more capable. And we also expect an increase in the pace of crossover investments this year as well. Right now, royalties make up 2% of NAV. These assets are a little bit different and complementary. They're cash generative. They're uncorrelated and have a significant amount of downside protection. We think there is growing demand from great companies for royalty-based financing, especially, of course, as they approach the launch phase of their life cycle. We'll touch on that tiny bit more a little bit later. All right. So today, you see the portfolio continues to be diversified across modalities, across disease area and also life cycle stage from development through to commercial. So a little bit closer look here, the top 10 portfolio positions as of the end of the year. I'll briefly touch on the top 5. PTC is a commercial stage disease company. They're launching Sephience for PKU, as I mentioned. We expect them to outperform existing products on the market that have done worse commercially because we think their product profiles are inferior with less efficacy and worse safety profiles. Corxel, which I mentioned, their lead asset is a global asset that's an oral GLP-1. In January, the company just successfully closed one of the larger private financings in the sector of the year, nearly a $300 million Series D. Corxel will have China Phase III and U.S. Phase II data over the course of the next several months. Together with Kailera, the other obesity company, it represents roughly 40% of RTW Bio's private exposure at the moment. Stoke, this is a clinical stage RNA medicines company. They showed the Phase II data, as I mentioned, in Dravet, where they were able to reduce seizures by pretty striking 80%. UroGen, this is another commercial stage cancer company. They're launching now in bladder cancer. We're involved in the equity, and we also have royalty exposure as well. And then finally, Insmed, they're launching the first product ever approved for bronchiectasis, which is a very large, potential $5 billion to $10 billion unmet need. All right. Here, you see that the themes that our 6 sub-teams of 2 to 5 investors each are focused on. And by the way, we did just add a seventh new AI-focused sub-team. I'll just kind of touch on some of the latest trends in some of these buckets, starting with oncology. This is a big year for biotech for oncology. There are major tumor types now where the standard of care has the potential to be significantly changed, #1 in pancreatic cancer, also in breast cancer as well as bladder cancer. In obesity and cardiometabolic, oral obesity launches are the focus for this year. And then for the following next couple of years, you're going to start to hear a lot more about next-generation mechanisms that aren't even GLP-based. So still a lot of change and innovation to come in obesity. In cardiovascular, you're seeing some interesting smaller companies emerge, for example, Tenax in our portfolio. Immunology, there's still a lot to do here. There have been many highly effective new mechanisms over the last several years. We're now seeing those try to be combined to generate even better efficacy. And you're seeing existing mechanisms being taken into new major specialty disease indications with high unmet need like myositis and like Graves' disease. In neuropsych, continues to be a lot of exciting innovation. We are now getting very close to the first psychedelics, hopefully, reaching the market. We think that will be a major new category. There are also outside of that, some big new disease indications, for example, like the Dravet example with seizures. Rare disease, despite the challenges at FDA, we continue to see steady innovation. We'll see what happens with some of the edge cases this year, in particular, Huntington's disease; Rett, which is another seizure disorder, a developmental disorder; and Dravet. All right. So we are always asked for specific case studies. So I'm very, very briefly going to touch on 2, one public and one private. So as I mentioned, PTC is launching Sephience for PKU. We expect them to actually long term generate revenues that may be roughly 2x consensus peak sales. We think the Street likely mismodels the total size of the opportunity because of the poor performance of the products that are on the market. Those are priced lower. As I mentioned, they just have worse product profiles in terms of efficacy and side effect profiles. And so we think Sephience has the potential to significantly outperform. Now to Kailera, as I mentioned, one of our 2 major obesity privates. Their lead asset, KAI-9531, that is an injectable GLP/GIP. It has best-in-category potential, and that's already supported by positive China Phase III data. All right. So we showed this slide, I think, for the first time at the last annual results. It helps to disaggregate a bit the performance of our private investments. There's not a huge amount of change given muted activity in private part of the portfolio. But from the 2019 vintage, you saw one IPO that is Beta Bionics. From the 2024 vintage, you saw one go public reverse merger, that's Jade Biosciences and one IPO, Evommune. As I mentioned a couple of times now, we had 7 new private investments, which includes the 3 RTW NewCos. They are Prolium, Amani and Yarrow. So overall, like to date for the business, we have made 73 private investments since our IPO. They're held at roughly 1.7x MOIC, which represents a 16% IRR. Those investments that haven't had a liquidity event are held at a conservative 1.1x MOIC on average. And that's much less than the average across liquidity events, which is that 1.7x or full exits, which is 2.2x. Now it's worth keeping in mind that our holding period to a liquidity event is about 18 months on average because of our heavy focus on later stage or more mature assets. Even in our company creations, most of our investments, we don't expect to participate in several private rounds before they go public ready. All right. Just to briefly touch on royalties, a quick update on 4010. Half of our commitments have been deployed now. Some key updates -- the acquisition of Avadel means we realized the full cap on our LUMRYZ royalty. That's equal to 2.5x. UroGen's Zusduri is now in early launch. We've just funded milestone for Cardamyst, that's a nasal spray, for the treatment of arrhythmia, and that launch is starting as we speak. We also signed 2 new commitments, one to Aquestive and another to Savara. We are hopeful we will be raising the second vintage pretty soon. All right. With that, I'll hand it back to Oli.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#4

Thanks, Rod. Well, as you've heard, 2025 was a great year for RTW Bio and for biotech more broadly. Our NAV returned 36%, and that contributes to our index beating and peer-leading compound performance since IPO of almost 15% a year. In tandem with that good performance, the discount to NAV almost halved from the end of 2024, where it was 23% to 12% at the end of last year. On top of that great portfolio performance, being included in the FTSE 250 Index played a key part in this and RTW Bio continues to benefit from a more international profile, greater secondary market liquidity and more relevance to a global set of investors. Looking ahead, as Rod mentioned, the political risks that buffeted the sector through most of last year are largely behind us and biotech remains attractively valued. The sector is off the lows, but it's still materially below the peaks reached in 2021 compared to broader equity markets, which continue to trade near all-time highs despite short-term volatility. Those attractive valuations, as Rod mentioned, are in the context of a wave of maturing innovation that we're so excited about. There's this new cohort of biotechs generating revenue from commercializing their own drugs with revenue profiles comparable to tech companies. We think that makes biotech a sector that generalist investors can no longer ignore. I'd like to thank you again for your continued support. And with that, I'd like to open up to Q&A. Thank you to those of you who have already submitted questions through the Q&A function here and via e-mail. Please keep them coming either here or via e-mail to [email protected]. If we don't manage to get to your question, please accept our apologies, and we'll try and respond to you directly via e-mail afterwards.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#5

So Rod, moving to the questions. Question one, is the alpha opportunity as good in commercial stage companies as clinical stage? Has there been any change to your underwriting targets or the duration of your investments?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#6

Yes. The very brief answer is yes. It's not as intuitively obvious to people, but commercial forecasting is something that we've done and taken very seriously really since our inception. So it's something we've had a lot of experience with. And it's -- when I think about it intuitively, I think a lot of people that invest in our space are really attracted and passionate about the science. And so the amount of talent that you actually have taking commercial forecasting seriously is actually quite low. So that, I think, intuitively creates opportunity. There's also been a lot of change on the commercial side with the amount of data that's available for forecasting. So we do think that alpha is -- there's significant alpha opportunity, always has been and will continue to be.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#7

Thank you. Question two, you alluded to this a little bit, but is this a false dawn in biotech? How much further does the market have to run?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#8

Yes. Hopefully, we've addressed this question largely, which is that we actually think it's the early innings because, one, the innovation boom is maturing. We're seeing that the exciting early-stage science that emerged several years ago, some of it is successful and enough of it such that you're seeing record-breaking now, hopefully, numbers of new drugs and not just the number, but drugs that are very transformative to patients. So better drugs. And we think that trend will continue. And with that, as you see more companies be successful commercially, then you'll really see kind of value creation start to accelerate because obviously, the largest chunk of value creation actually comes at the commercial stage, not the scientific stage.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#9

Thank you. Next question I will take, which is buybacks looked a bit light last year, share buybacks. Do you intend to do more in the future? We've tried to set out previously how we consider share buybacks, which are within our broader capital allocation framework. That's designed to balance multiple priorities in the pursuit of attractive long-term returns for you, the shareholders. It's important to recognize that our strategy in biotech and biotech generally is inherently capital intensive. Our investments typically require ongoing funding to progress through clinical development or early commercialization. So maintaining sufficient liquidity is critical, particularly in a fast-moving environment where you really are rewarded for the ability to deploy capital nimbly and then, therefore, that can drive significant value. That said, we stated where we generate meaningful cash inflows, we've demonstrated a willingness to return capital. And in particular, following realizations, including public M&A activity within the portfolio, we've allocated a portion of proceeds to NAV accretive buybacks. In October last year, we allocated a further $15 million to our buyback budget, that's in addition to $30 million previously committed. We're mindful of the current discount. We think it's great that it's halved to the level that it has done as at year-end, but we recognize there's more to do and that shareholders are sensitive to persistent or elevated levels. While our primary focus remains long-term value creation, we continue to be opportunistic in executing those buybacks where they're accretive, and you have seen us in recent weeks stepping into the market. Ultimately, we believe it's an exceptional environment for deploying capital across public and private opportunities. So we're trying to carefully balance those near-term discount management considerations with the opportunity to capture substantial long-term growth. Back on to portfolio and the market, Rod, please, can you talk about the general health of the U.S. IPO market for biotech?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#10

Yes. Before the war broke out, this was on track to be the first normal IPO year in several. We remain optimistic, but I think, obviously, the big unknown is how long the Iran war lasts and whether it escalates because that obviously would have some impact on the pace of IPOs, but we're optimistic.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#11

Thank you. We talked about a few megatrends. One we didn't particularly cover was AI in any great detail. There is one question which is, where is AI genuinely adding value today?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#12

That's a great question. I'll kind of split it in 2 buckets. So in the short term, it is outside of drug development where we are seeing immediate opportunities for new products and services that generate return revenues and that changes growth profiles for companies. So our AI sub-team, one of their key initial areas of focus is precisely looking for those kinds of businesses. We think we're especially well positioned because we have maintained a MedTech or non-therapeutics team really since we've been in business, which is actually quite different from the vast majority of our peers. So we understand those businesses, and we're well positioned to hopefully find some of those opportunities. And actually, we do have already a high single-digit percentage of our overall assets beyond RTW, but across the firm deployed in businesses like that. So that's one bucket. The other bucket is in drug discovery. We absolutely do expect AI to have a major impact, maybe even larger than the impact of the genome, which was transformational over the last 2 decades, a couple of dozen years, on the productivity and speed and quality of drug discovery. But as everybody knows, drug discovery is a process that takes several years at a minimum. And so it's not something that you're going to see in revenue numbers today. But over the medium term, we think that will only continue to contribute to productivity in our sector improving. I'd actually say that 2 things, AI and then second, the emergence of China have the potential to increase research productivity in drug discovery to a pace we've never seen before, which -- that could be quite transformational for our industry because many of you may know that large-cap pharmaceutical companies spend more of each dollar of revenue -- a higher percentage of revenue than any other industry, I think, by almost double, right, so 23%, I believe, is the average of revenue is reinvested every year into R&D. Now if you can improve the return on that amount, then you can imagine what that could do to actually re-rate the industry.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#13

Thank you. You talked about biotech growing up. What does the next wave of biotechs look like?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#14

I think the next wave of biotechs is really just commercial biotechs. And from the list that I mentioned, they represent a range of different types of companies, right? So you have Alnylam, which is really originally a platform company. It represents the maturation of RNA medicines to the point that you can apply that technology to a wide range of diseases, even diseases of relatively healthy people, right? That's how safe RNA has become as an example. But you have other very different types of phenotypes as well. Insmed, for example, is a single -- not a single, but the core driver of that business is one main product, just for a very large unmet need, and that's using a traditional small molecule technology. You have argenx, which is a company tackling many diseases within immunology as another example. So the innovation is broad, and we think you're going to continue to see that. And that's what really is so exciting. It's not a single source, which does is further evidence of why this is so sustainable. It's really a broad range of innovation.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#15

Thank you. Next question is on the FDA. You alluded to it briefly, but the question is, what's your latest thoughts on personnel change at the FDA?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#16

Yes. I think the big question is just who is the new leadership under Commissioner Makary going to be. Right now, there is no permanent head of CDER or CBER. And it is those leaders that ultimately have ownership of individual product approval decisions. So they are critical, who is in those seats. Makary kind of sits above that and has a broader mandate. So I am optimistic that the administration has gotten the message from people in the ecosystem, including patients, physicians as well as drug developers that the prior leadership, especially of CBER, was shifting to conservatively, specifically for rare disease and gene and cell therapies, and that we need leaders who are supportive of innovation and regulatory flexibility in those particular areas. So we'll have to see. I think we'll probably have new leaders in place over the next 1 to 2 months.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#17

And final question. Again, you alluded to some of this, but maybe a different angle here. Which of the key investment themes do you believe are most undervalued and why?

Roderick Tze Wong

Executives
#18

Well, one theme that we've been talking about this year is oncology. So as probably many people know, cancer has always, for a long time, represented the single largest area of drug development is relatively consistent. But historically, a bulk of that innovation has come in the large companies, in multinational pharma. This year is a bit unique, in that you really have transformational products for the cancer types that I mentioned, right, pancreatic, breast and bladder that are all largely coming from small and medium-sized biotech companies. And that's very, very exciting. And we'll have data in all of those over the next handful of months. So we're optimistic that they will deliver transformational change to standard of care. And so that is a theme that we would especially highlight.

Oliver Kenyon

Executives
#19

Thank you, Rod. That brings us to the end of the Q&A session and the results of the whole. I'd like to thank everybody for attending the webinar this morning. We will follow up with those questions we didn't manage to get to. I'm just going to show you some important disclosures here. And then finally, these are all the ways that you can stay in touch with us, social media, LinkedIn, signing up to our fact sheets, et cetera. So we'd like to thank you for your support again, and we look forward to updating you at our interim results later this year.

Operator

Operator
#20

Fantastic. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session to be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and it's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the team at RTW Biotech Opportunities Limited, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.

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