Can you give an overview of Allucent and the main milestones the company achieved in the past years?

Allucent’s journey started in 2018 to take advantage of an opportunity we saw in the marketplace. There are approximately 7,600 drugs in development today, and 75% to 80% of these compounds are being developed by small and midsize companies. Smaller companies’ needs and requirements differ from that of big pharma. Allucent saw this as an opportunity given that a significant amount of intellectual property (IP) and cutting-edge science in the industry resides within these smaller companies, and we thus created a purpose-built firm to help smaller players develop their products and bring them to market. In 2022, we completed the acquisitions and integration of CATO SMS and Pharm-Olam. This was a game changer for us as it gave us a broad global footprint and more breadth and depth from a therapeutic area standpoint. After this series of strategic acquisitions, we rebranded to Allucent, which is Latin for ‘shining the light on something.’ Today, we have developed deep expertise in critical areas that are often hard to source for smaller companies, such as biostatistical and clinical pharmacologyexpertise.

What does industry demand look like?

Oncology continues to lead industry demand. This area constitutes approximately 40% of dollars spent on R&D inthe industry. This was thus a key focus area for us and one of our earlier acquisitions was SMS-Oncology, a Dutch oncology-focused CRO. Another therapeutic area seeing high interest is rare and orphan indications. Pharm-Olam was the highest-rated midsize CRO working in rare and orphan indications and this acquisition allowed us to add depth and experience to the organization within this area.

A reemerging area today is central nervous system (CNS) diseases. For a while, this area was a bit out of favor in the investment community due to many failures. Recently, we have started to see some successes, which givehope to populations with CNS diseases. This is an area with significant pent-up science that will now again increasingly find its way into the clinic as more investments are being made into the space. Finally, another modality receiving attention is cell and gene therapy. There is now a host of different cutting-edge technologies being applied to diseases that did not lend themselves to simpler approaches.

How does Allucent stand out in the CRO space?

Allucent offers a one-stop-shop solution to our customers and the expertise we bring significantly adds value to the drug development process. We often engage with companies in consulting around their drug development plansand interaction with regulators even before their clinical trials begin and their IND is filed. We will help companiespull all their non-clinical data together and guide the process of establishing a development plan and getting an IND filed. This has been an increasingly busy area for us and is currently also accelerating in the industry. Another area that is growing rapidly is our modeling and simulation business. This entails taking data from non-clinical and external clinical sources and putting that together in mathematical models to predict how trials will go, improve trial designs, and in several cases, eliminate the need for certain trials as the FDA will accept modeling results as part of the guidance in terms of how to dose medication.

What trends do you see shaping the life sciences industry in the US looking into 2023?

Our target market, small and mid-sized companies, are capital market dependent and have been challenged in attaining funding for their R&D. The confluence of events such as COVID-19, the Russian-Ukraine war, and massive inflation has created uncertainty in the markets which makes raising capital difficult. Fortunately, I believe we have seen the bottom of this situation in 2022, and we are starting to see improvement. Even with this environment being what it is, there is still a huge opportunity for drug development, and I believe when looking back at this time a few years from now, fundraising challenges will be a footnote and the real storyline will be the exciting science of the time.

How will Allucent grow in the coming 12 months?

We expect to see growth accelerate in 2023 as the markets start to right themselves.