In honor of JPM Week, you’re studying a particular version of our biotech publication, The Readout. To remain on prime of the most recent scoops and reside reporting from the San Francisco convention, be a part of our publication checklist.
“The lanyards” have landed! Apparently, that’s what the great people of San Francisco name everybody who descends on town for the J.P Morgan Healthcare Convention. Certainly one of our STAT colleagues was at a neighborhood bar final night time and overheard a gaggle of San Franciscans lamenting about the entire folks in convention lanyards and Allbirds sneakers — or “Salesforce 1s,” as one other bar patron referred to as them — that had been beginning to fill town. Properly, if we’re going to take over town, let’s get some information out of it!
M&A occurred
Johnson & Johnson is shopping for Ambrx Biopharma. Merck is shopping for Harpoon Therapeutics. And whereas it’s not a performed deal but, Novartis does look like circling round Cytokinetics, according to our reporting brethren at the Wall Street Journal.
Oh, and Eric Tokat tweeted twice!
All in, Monday was a reasonably satisfying day for M&A at JPM. The XBI biotech inventory index closed up 5%.
Talking of Tokat, the Centerview Companions adviser — and biotech’s most prolific dealmaker — sat down for espresso with Adam Feuerstein. The subsequent 12 months, he mentioned, will probably be one other robust yr for acquisitions, pushed by Large Pharma’s must restock pipelines with medicines that may generate gross sales within the coming years.
“M&A is being pushed by pharma’s wants and the innovation that’s taking place,” mentioned Tokat. “The 2025 to 2030 time-frame could be very difficult for pharma as a result of a whole lot of their medication are shedding patent safety and their inside pipelines are inadequate to realize the expansion they require, so that they must look externally.”
Learn extra.
Nvidia says biotech is at an inflection level. Is it?
When the primary $1 trillion chip maker involves well being care’s largest assembly, folks come to pay attention. So it was that the Nvidia presentation at J.P. Morgan was not simply full, nor merely standing room solely. Folks poured out of the comparatively small upstairs room and into the hallway such that it was unattainable to listen to the presentation. Undaunted, STAT’s Matthew Herper listened to the webcast on headphones whereas crammed in opposition to one of many room’s open doorways.
The information? Nvidia is building a supercomputer for Amgen, and increasing its partnership with AI-focused biotech Recursion Prescription drugs. But in addition the corporate has a imaginative and prescient by which biology has hit the second the place it turns into digital and machine studying will velocity up drug improvement because it has chip design.
It’s tantalizing. It’s additionally been mentioned earlier than. Even with all of the sudden progress in digital AI, how do we all know if that second has lastly arrived?
Biotech VC will get the band again collectively
It’s definitely not been the simplest few years for Sage Therapeutics, the neuroscience firm that has been plugging away at introducing new melancholy remedies, with combined outcomes. The corporate’s newest transfer was to put off 40% of its employees and half methods with its chief scientific officer final August. Sage presents on the convention this afternoon, however within the meantime, its former executives are transferring on.
Former CEO Jeff Jonas and Al Robichaud, the previous science chief, are becoming a member of Boston VC agency Remedy Ventures to steer its neuroscience investments, they instructed STAT solely. Remedy hasn’t disclosed what precisely it hopes to do in nervous system problems, however it plans to disclose extra later this yr.
It’s possible you’ll recall that Jonas had teamed up with funding large CBC Group final yr to develop a brand new biotech incubator. Properly, he parted methods with that enterprise in September, saying solely that “we had differing visions about incubation.”
Neuroscience has come again into favor within the drug business, and it benefited considerably from biotech’s December bump. Two main neuroscience startups, Karuna Therapeutics and Cerevel Therapeutics, had been acquired final month by Bristol Myers Squibb and AbbVie, respectively.
Learn extra.
Bristol’s new CEO cautiously makes his debut
Christopher Boerner, who has been the CEO of Bristol Myers Squibb for 2 months, took the stage earlier in the present day with a transparent plan to ease traders’ nerves. His fundamental message: The corporate has been by way of having huge medication go generic, and the gross sales it can lose this time will probably be manageable and can result in one other interval of renewal.
What’s uncomfortable is that what traders really need is just not a historical past lesson however readability on whether or not Bristol can execute on utilizing its big however waning franchises to launch new merchandise and construct a renewed firm. And though Bristol has elevated the variety of medicines approaching the market by way of each its personal inside efforts and thru offers, what traders wish to see is a few strong gross sales development of the corporate’s not too long ago launched medicines.
Learn extra.
A change in tone at Biomarin
For years, whereas CEO of Biomarin Pharmaceutical, Jean-Jacques Bienaimé spoke of the grand potential of the corporate’s hemophilia A gene remedy, talking at least once of treating as much as 5,000 sufferers per yr whereas charging $2 to $3 million per dose — a recipe for $10 billion to $15 billion in income.
Biomarin’s new CEO is promising to speak much less.
Alexander Harding, freshly put in after a five-year tenure as chief of Genentech, instructed a J.P. Morgan viewers that the corporate would now not make predictions about its gene remedy. The remarks got here after the therapy, Roctavian, delayed for years, confronted a disastrous launch in 2023. Harding disclosed in his remarks that the primary U.S. affected person was solely handled on the finish of December. “It’s slower than anybody would have anticipated,” he mentioned.
Though trial knowledge present the one-time remedy dramatically reduces the chance of bleeding for years, it comes with a $2.9 million price ticket, is competing with different extremely efficient therapies, and no longer appears to be the one-time cure many hoped. Harding mentioned there was a “clear worth proposition” however that launch would take time and the corporate wasn’t going to make guarantees.
“We’re going to let the outcomes do the speaking for it,” he mentioned. “That’s what we’re going to concentrate on is the outcomes slightly than offering a number of expectations and forecasts on Roctavian.”
As a substitute, Harding targeted totally on Voxzogo, the corporate’s therapy for achondroplasia, a genetically pushed type of dwarfism. The corporate plans to push it into different indications marked by quick stature as they search to show it right into a blockbuster product.
