A total of 198 small- and mid-cap Bio/Pharma companies are currently involved in vaccine or therapeutic development for COVID-19, with a total of 244 unique candidates in the pipeline from these companies. Of these, small-cap companies have the largest proportion of the pipeline candidates for COVID-19 (85%), either the discovery or preclinical stages. This indicates that there are potential partnership or investment opportunities with these companies to develop their drugs further, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Johanna Swanson, Product Manager at GlobalData, comments: “The most advanced candidates in Phase III in the COVID-19 pipeline of small- and mid-cap companies are all repurposed drugs, which is not surprising considering they can be more quickly adapted to later-stage clinical trials as their safety and dosing regimens are better known.”

Biologics represent 50% of the small- and mid-cap therapeutics in development, 42% of which are antibody therapies. As biologics are a fast-growing class of therapeutic compounds and are targeted therapies with reduced side effects, it is not surprising that they are being tested for COVID-19.

Swanson continues: “One-fifth of these vaccine candidates in development by small- and mid-cap companies are based on novel DNA- and ribonucleic acid (RNA)-based vaccine technologies, which have major cost and scalability advantages over conventional and other types of vaccines when responding to a pandemic. However, they are as-yet unproven technologies, as there are no marketed RNA or DNA vaccines.

“Partnership/investment opportunities exist with small-cap companies developing vaccines, as 42 of 43 vaccine candidates are in either the discovery or preclinical stages, and the companies have a surplus of innovative ideas but lack funding to run trials.”