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ASX & AusBiotech

Code of Best Practice for
Reporting by Biotechnology, Medical
Device and other Life Sciences Companies

 

 

Recent scientific advances including the completion of the Human Genome project have caused many in the world of science and business alike to view the early years of this century as a watershed in natural history, marking the beginning of a century dubbed “the Century of Biotechnology”.

Alongside these developments in the scientific arena has been a significant global expansion in capital market activity in the biotechnology sector as life science companies seek to access capital to fund research, development and commercialisation of their products and platforms. Investors in turn have sought to benefit from the extraordinary development potential of the industry.

If we examine the history of other technological leaps forward, we can see that understanding by capital markets of the underlying science and the availability of investment capital tend to lag behind the cutting edge of the technology.

In this regard, biotechnology companies represent a significant challenge for both
professional and retail investors in terms of valuation and understanding. They also represent a challenge for market operators such as ASX in terms of providing well-informed, orderly, transparent, fair and efficient markets in the sector.

In response to these challenges, ASX is seeking to develop a code for reporting that is jointly developed between ASX and AusBiotech in consultation with leading participants from the biotechnology sector, as well as analysts from the investment community.

In developing this working draft, ASX has taken a very broad view on what should be included in ‘biotechnology’. We have included device, drug discovery, diagnostics and delivery companies in an attempt to capture companies that are essentially attempting to commercialise technology that has a basis or application in life science.

Clearly this broad definition will include companies whose scientific basis have as much to do with physics and engineering as they have to do with any biological discipline or medicine. We believe this convergence and blurring of the lines between the basic scientific disciplines, and the subsequent convergence of technology industries is what sums biotechnology up in the first place....이하생략