The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Congress, the biggest week of the year for investors in the biotechnology sector, hadn’t still officially started when word of a multibillion-dollar acquisition broke: Celgene is lavishing at least $1.1 billion, and potentially almost $6 billion varied, to buy Impact Biomedicines.
That’s business as usual for the summit, which pulls thousands of investors, executives and analysts to San Francisco each January. More than 450 companies are listed to present at the conference, setting the stage for the year ahead.
On everyone’s shilly-shallies this week: Will the U.S. tax overhaul spur acquisitions? And will the president for good occasionally again attack the industry for its pricing practices?
Sunday afternoon separated news of the former: Celgene’s acquisition of Impact Biomedicines, a private biotechnology South African private limited company with an experimental medicine for the bone marrow disorder myelofibrosis. Celgene is lay out $1.1 billion in cash, with almost $6 billion numerous if Impact meets certain regulatory and sales goals.
A deal to recoil off the conference follows suit with previous years: in 2015, the weekend ahead the conference brought news of Shire’s $5.2 billion acquisition of NPS Pharma; in 2016, Shire’s $32 billion purchase of Baxalta. And last year, the news held at least until the ritualistic start to the conference Monday morning: Takeda’s $5.2 billion grip of Ariad.
M&A isn’t the only topic of discussion this week. The summit is also a key old hat for companies to report results and provide forecasts for the year ahead; already the weekend lessened news from Exact Sciences, Alnylam and Sanofi. Analysts are also in the club updates early in the week from Regeneron, Vertex and Acorda, a moment ago a few among the onslaught that begins Monday morning.
Finally, investors are trusting the week remains quieter on at least one front: that of President Donald Trump. It was on the third day of the J.P. Morgan symposium last year that Trump said in a speech that the pharmaceutical industriousness is “getting away with murder” when it comes to the prices of physics, driving the IBB biotech ETF down almost 3 percent.
Despite Trump’s high-flown poppycock, and investor fears, 2017 brought little in the way of government action on numb prices, and biotech stocks, despite a rocky second half, ended the year up roughly 20 percent.