Valeant, Alnylam & Juno shares took some of the biggest hits last year

Investors didn’t hold back when biopharma companies stumbled in 2016.

Multiple trial deaths saw Juno Therapeutics stock price fall 67 percent over the 12-month period. Safety concerns also haunted Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which finished the year down 60 percent. Trumping them all, Valeant Pharmaceuticals took a whopping 86 percent share price hit, wiping $29.7 billion off its market capitalization.

The final tallies for 2016 – both the winners and the losers – were delivered Tuesday courtesy of EP Vantage, the editorial arm of life science commercial intelligence firm Evaluate.

This year’s report, Pharma & Biotech 2016 in Review, tells of a year split by macro forces.

Biopharma investment, mergers and acquisitions started out strong but as the election loomed, the industry seized up. As a result, all the major pharma and biotech indices closed the year in the red, falling significantly despite double-digit growth in the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).

The early optimism and the uncertainty can be seen in the 2016 M&A trends. Biopharma deals in the first half of the year were worth a combined $66.6 billion, compared to just $32.1 billion in Q3 and Q4.

As for individual deals, Shire’s $32 billion acquisition of Baxalta was more than twice the size of the runner-up; Pfizer’s $14 billion acquisition of Medivation in August. Just three other deals exceeded $5 billion.

The M&A market appears to be playing catch-up in 2017.

In January, Takeda announced a $5.2 billion acquisition of Ariad Pharmaceuticals, dropping the news on the first day of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The following day, Valeant announced various asset sales totaling $2.12 billion in an effort to pay down debt. Johnson & Johnson then stole the show, acquiring Swiss biotech Actelion for $30 billion in late January.

For private companies, venture capital investment was down in 2016 after a positive spike in 2015.

Notably, the average size of financing rounds hit $25 million, the highest figure to date. That was boosted by mega-rounds closed by Moderna Therapeutics ($451 million), Innovent Biologics ($260 million), Blue Rock Therapeutics ($225 million) and more.

For established companies, the results were mixed.

GlaxoSmithKline was the top performing Big Pharma company, posting a 14 percent increase in its share price during the financial year. Johnson & Johnson and Merck were second and third, with gains of 12 percent and 11 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, Allergan was reeling from the collapse of its $160 billion acquisition by Pfizer, which was canned in April 2016. Its shares finished the year down 33 percent. AstraZeneca and Roche also made the biggest loser list, down 20 percent and 16 percent respectively.

In the $25 billion-plus market valuation group, Valeant and Teva Pharmaceuticals registered the two biggest losses, highlighting the demise of the specialty pharma model.

Celgene, Astellas Pharma and Biogen made the largest gains. The latter has been under fire, however, for hiking the list price on its existing drugs and introducing a new rare disease therapy at $750,000 for the first year.

For the mid-cap companies, the share price swings were intense. Interestingly, all five of the top climbers were headquartered outside the United States. All but one of the top five stock price calamities were homegrown.

A lot of the damage to Endo International came in May when it lowered its earnings outlook for the year by 80 percent. Endo was also named in an antitrust investigation launched in November 2016.

The new year brings new opportunities, but the elephant has not left the room. Pharma and biotech indices were beginning to rally at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in 2017 until then president-elect Donald Trump announced plans to tackle drug pricing. Expect this to be a big issue in the coming years.

Photo: Big Stock

Correction: An earlier version of this article included an error in the mergers and acquisitions table. The Jazz and Celator deal was worth $1.5 billion, not $0.2 billion.