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Poltroons and pick-up lines: What’s buzzing at #JPM15

Happy JP MorganWeek! Presenting companies have been bottling up the best news they can muster, to announce […]

Happy JP MorganWeek!

Presenting companies have been bottling up the best news they can muster, to announce with aplomb this week at the premier biotech investing event in the country.

It’s already begun: Shire just acquired NPS Pharmaceuticals for a whopping $5.2 billion – not a shocking acquisition, but a large and well-timed one. And XConomy just dished a roundup of spanking-new life sci deals – the “Pre-JP Morgan Preening Edition.” More shall invariably come. But beyond the big deals, here’s some of the buzz surrounding next week’s madness:

Venture capitalist Bruce Booth‘s pithiness is on full display in this hilarious piece penned for Forbes that outlines the expected chatter, as pharma cronies rub elbows and get tanked:

  •  “We’ve established definitive clinical proof of concept in You’ve-Never-Heard-Of-This-Orphan-Disease” and are heading towards registration trials.  With 7000 orphan diseases, this statement just may be true no matter how many times you hear it.
  • “We’re going to be the Agios-of-X…” Conveyed during private biotech pitches as a “comparable” future trajectory, like the Uber-of-X theme in tech.  Maybe true, maybe not – but $AGIO is a pretty special 1-in-500 type of company.
  • “If only we could have done that tax inversion deal…”  Maybe we won’t hear this one, but I’m sure there are a lot of CFOs and buyside investors daydreaming about it

Adam Feuerstein wrote a couple useful tip sheets for what some of the bigger players have in store. Here’s part one, and here’s part two. Excerpt:

Novartis (NVS)
Mon. Jan. 12 at 12 PM ET
Webcast: Presentation only

CAR-T. CAR-T. CAR-T. Is there really anything else?

Feuerstein also pointed out how few of the presenting companies plan to webcast their Q&As – “proving once again that some antiquated barriers to investor transparency remain stubbornly difficult to tear down.” Forbes‘ Matthew Herper tweeted out Feuerstein’s story:

Nice use of the word “poltroon.” Means “utter coward.” CNBC put together an analysis of how the market overall performs surrounding JPM week – and when’s best to invest in life science stocks. Here’s a bit of what was said:

    • The S&P 500 usually rises during the week of the conference; it’s up 77 percent of the time, with an average return of 0.32 percent over five days. But both the SPDR Health Care ETF and the iShares Nasdaq Biotech ETF typically outperform the S&P that week. Health care has returned an average of 1.56 percent, while biotech has increased an average 2.1 percent.
    • If you sell the first day of the conference, history would suggest you’d miss out on the broader gains. Health care is usually up 0.76 percent the first day, while biotech usually rises 0.36 percent.

Ron Leuty over at the San Francisco Business Times posted a field guide to #JPM15, which – along with notes on how to find the closest massage parlor – points out:

Some really interesting presenting companies, like Theranos Inc., the Palo Alto company that is the buzz of the consumer diagnostics world. Or former Genentech Inc. CEO Art Levinson’s South San Francisco aging research company, Calico. Or Shockwave Medical, a Fremont company that this month won European regulatory approval for a balloon catheter to treat peripheral artery disease with powerful mechanical pulses.

Oh! And best thing ever: #JPMpickuplines. Some highlights:

Aw. Nerds are funny.

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