Fig. 2

Cumulative Count/ Amount of the Partnership and Fundraising Deals (Monthly). Figure 2(A) shows the cumulative count of partnership deals since January 2011 by different disease types. Note that not all deals are presented in the charts. We pick only deals in the 5 major disease therapy categories for simplicity because the numbers of deals and average deal sizes in other categories are relatively trivial. The light yellow area indicates the main time period of our descriptive analysis (2018-2022). The darker yellow area represents the early phase of the pandemic (2020 alone), during which partnership deals experienced a significant increase. Similarly, Fig. 2(B) displays the cumulative amount of fundraising deals by development phase. The light-yellow area indicates the main time period of our descriptive analysis (2018-2022). In contrast to Fig. 2(A), the darker yellow area corresponds to the period between 2020 and 2021, during which fundraising deals observed a notable increase. In both Fig. 2(A) and 2(B), the pink numbers indicate the label of the corresponding time-points, while the white numbers on pink-filled circles represent the differences between the two time-points. As these are cumulative charts, the white numbers signify the number of deals during the darker-yellow periods