Introduction

Welcome to the Arthur Cox Life Sciences Outlook 2025.

Life Sciences is a key sector for the Irish economy and our firm, and we are lucky to work with many of the world’s largest and most innovative pharmaceutical, biotech and medtech businesses in Ireland across a number of areas.

In this, our team’s first annual outlook, we speak to an industry leader, Oliver O’Connor, the CEO of the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association. We give our thoughts on some of the areas that are keeping us and the industry busy. We will look at transaction and disputes activity, consider regulatory and compliance issues across products, ESG and data and examine the development of infrastructure in the sector in Ireland.

The sector has been operating in a challenging environment over the past 12 months and will continue to do so for the next while. Significant regulatory changes are on the horizon and changes proposed by the US government could potentially have a destabilising effect on the industry. Against that backdrop, the industry is continuing to focus on what it does best – developing and bringing life-changing products to patients. We hope that the Outlook 2025 gives you a sense of the activity happening on the ground, where some of the opportunities are and how some of the challenges can be navigated.

All that remains is for me to thank all the contributors for their time and effort, particularly Oliver O’Connor.

I hope that our publication is of interest to you.

Colin