The Israeli life-sciences industry has grown 80 percent in the past decade, and its life-sciences companies raised more than $6.7 billion on NASDAQ during that time, $5 billion of which was raised since 2013.
Those are among the findings in the 2016 Israeli Life Sciences Report issued yesterday by the Israel Advanced Technology Industries (IATI) — the umbrella organization of the high-tech and life-sciences industries in Israel — ahead of the 2017 MIXiii Biomed conference in Tel Aviv on May 23-25.
Some $823 million in funding flowed into the industry last year, representing 20% of all investments in Israeli high-tech.
According to the IATI report, about 1,350 life-sciences companies currently are active in Israel, 612 of them established in the last decade (2007-2016).
The report classifies life sciences companies into five sub-sectors: medical devices, pharma/biotech (including agro-biotech), diagnostics, healthcare IT (including telemedicine and bioinformatics) and “others.”
Fully 42% of active companies are in the medical devices sub-sector, which continued to attract the most investment dollars and deals in the life-sciences sectors in 2016.
In the two years since the last IATI report, the healthcare IT and digital health sub-sectors have surged in number of companies and funding raised. More than half of these companies were established in the last five years. Personal health is the most prominent subsector and health analytics is the second largest.
Another point of note is the continued increase in mergers and acquisitions involving Israeli companies.
Technology-transfer companies from eight research universities and 11 research institutes and hospitals across Israel filed 509 original patent applications in 2015, and were involved in setting up 53 startup companies.
The patent applications were in biotechnology (25%), medicine (15%) and physics, electronics and electro-optics (14%) while the active license agreements included biotechnology (22%), agriculture and plant genetics (21%) and medicine (15%).
In 2016, 16% of industrial exports from Israel were related to pharmaceutical products, reaching $6.9 billion – 1.5% more than in 2015. Pharmaceuticals also provided about 30% of overall industrial high-tech exports.
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