THE FUTURE OF THE NEURO INDUSTRY – Position paper Alcimed

The field of neuroscience has been the stage of enormous scientific and technological progress with significant investments from both public and private actors provided to increase our understanding of the functioning of human brain in physiological and pathological conditions.

Yet, the efforts and investments in this field have not delivered results as expected and the majority of the treatments we use, almost none of which are curative, date back to the 1980s or 1990s.

At Alcimed we believe that the field of Neuroscience is at a tipping point: while pharma companies are progressively disinvesting from R&D in neurological diseases due to several late-stage drug candidate failures, an increasing number of promising and innovative start-ups and biotech are offering tools to accelerate drug development and to treat some incurable neurological diseases, sparking a positive light on the future of the neuro-industry.

In this paper we share our vision on the factors that hinder the development of novel and curative drugs for neurological diseases, we analyse the main progresses the neuroscience field is living and we suggest the strategic axes that the pharma and tech industries should consider to eventually generate the much-needed solutions to the current open challenges in the field.