Moreover, Roche recently made headlines with a $50 million agreement with Dyno Therapeutics to develop novel adeno-associated virus vectors aimed at delivering gene therapies for neurological diseases.

Last year, Dyno introduced Low-shot Efficient Accelerated Performance (LEAP[SM]) to efficiently generate capsid sequences with improved performance beyond any of the capsids in the training data.

After a major spike during the COVID-19 pandemic years, cell and gene therapy investment has since slowed down considerably. The figures now look pale in comparison to the $19.9 billion made in 2020 and the $22.7 billion made in 2021, with levels falling to $12.6 billion in 2022 and $11.7 billion in 2023. This has led to many gene therapy companies in particular needing to cut programs or lay off workers to save money. In this article, we explore what is behind the investment slowdown and detail the unfortunate consequences of this.Table of contentsWhat’s behind the dip in investment in the gene therapy sector?As promising as gene therapies are, one of the main issues for investors is that these types of treatments come with a lot of risk and, even if they are successful, it takes a long time for them to produce monetary rewards, as they require much longer than other types of therapies to advance through the clinic before eventually reaching the market.“We’re largely seeing investments shifting to things that are de-risked,” said Jon Norris, managing director at HSBC Innovation Banking, in a statement to Biopharma Dive. “Cell and gene therapy is becoming an area we know better, because there are products that have advanced through development, but it still doesn’t compare to the number of approvals and drugs commercially available in small molecules or biologics.”Manufacturing bottlenecks are also a major factor putting off investors. Manufacturing gene therapies generally involves a long process that can take weeks to complete, as a patient’s cells are collected, multiplied, and modified in a laboratory