Barth: Dislocated biotech sector presents massive multi-asset investment opportunities
Brett Barth · Friends Reunion 3 – Five Allocators Riff on Investing (EP.454) · Jun 30, 2025 · at 39:12
Brett Barth, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of BBR Partners, explains why depressed valuations and capital starvation make biotechnology compelling across public and private markets.
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“One of the places where we see public, private, and credit incredibly dislocated, unloved, and where we think there's huge opportunity is biotech. It has been such a bubble through the pandemic where biotech and vaccines were going to solve everything, and now we've had a massive dearth of capital for years. The public markets cratered in 22 and have yet to meaningfully bounce. The capital markets, except for brief windows, have not been open. No one's reallocating to venture capital funds. It's incredibly unloved. You've got an FDA that doesn't think vaccines should be around. Drug development has really gone sideways. And then you've got a massive decrease in investment in basic science here in the United States. And so you've got to be able to look outside the US. The story's terrible, but we think it's going to climb that wall of woe. And back to entry point, you've got companies with great management teams, great science, cash on the balance sheet, and trading at massive discounts to cash, or are desperate for money, and you can structure private credit transactions that are really equity transactions. These are pre-revenue companies, but where you've got massive seniority and wonderful preferred returns and really neat structures. And so you can buy that through public companies, VC, private equity, and private credit. There's all kinds of things you can be doing in biotech today.”
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