Healthcare investors and executives are gathering in a sodden San Francisco on Monday for the year’s largest healthcare investment conference, the first time the confab has gathered in person since 2020.
Hosted by
JPMorgan Chase
(ticker: JPM), the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is slightly scaled back this year. The event is drawing 8,000 registered attendees this year, compared with 10,000 before the pandemic, according to a JPMorgan spokesperson.
“We’ve tried to keep the numbers lighter this year so there is more space to network,” the spokesperson told Barron’s.
Investors will be watching to see whether a smaller conference means fewer deals. Companies often time major merger and acquisition announcements to the first day of the event, and the level of M&A activity announced during the conference is often taken as a bellwether for the year to come.
In recent years, it’s been the lack of M&A that has made news. Last year saw some smaller deals, including a $1.3 billion partnership between
Pfizer
(PFE) and
Beam Therapeutics
(BEAM), but nothing like 2019, when
Bristol-Myers Squibb
(BMY) announced its massive $75 billion deal to acquire Celgene.
JPMorgan did not hold an in-person conference in 2021, and in 2022 switched to a virtual format just weeks before attendees were scheduled to arrive, as the emergence of the Omicron variant led to a spike in Covid-19 cases.
While the conference itself is held at the Westin St. Francis, a hotel just off San Francisco’s Union Square, meetings and parallel events sprawl across the city’s downtown.
A long list of healthcare companies will present, including Bristol Myers,
Novartis
(NVS),
Merck
(MRK),
Biogen
(BIIB), and many others.
The Food and Drug Administration’s commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, will speak at an early-morning session on Tuesday.
Here are some themes to watch out for as the hordes descend on San Francisco on Monday.
-
The deals. How busy will the M&A news be on Monday? M&A activity in biotech heated up in late 2022, and the year ended with
Amgen’s
(AMGN) $27.8 billion deal for
Horizon Therapeutics
(HZNP). Will the momentum continue? - The prices. Expect lots of talk about drug pricing, both around the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year, which will usher in some drug pricing changes, and around high-priced treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s. (Also expect some complaints from attendees about food prices in San Francisco: In 2020, this reporter saw a banana for sale for $2.75 in the lobby of the Westin.)
- The IPOs. Industry watchers will be looking for evidence of shifting attitudes toward biotech IPOs, which dried up last year amid a sense that too many companies had been taken public too early during the rush of 2021 and 2020.
- The rain. Perhaps mostly of interest to investors, executives, journalists, and other assorted people attending the conference, but San Francisco has seen historic rains in recent days, and flooding in parts of the city. The wet and windy weather is set to continue. That could cause logistical problems and frustrations as attendees cross the city’s downtown for meetings and events. Difficulties getting to San Francisco are a possibility, as well: rain this week has caused flight delays and cancellations at the city’s airport.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
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