Ep. 346 - 2026 Public Markets Preview

BioTech's bull is back, and investors think it can stick. On a special edition of the BioCentury This Week podcast, we'll explore why. This podcast coincides with BioCentury Publishing, the four part 2026 public markets preview. Joining me to discuss this are the author and my fellow BioCentury this week host, Steven Hansen, and editor in chief Simone Fishburne and executive editor, Selena Koch, who edited the package. I'm Jeff Cranmer, executive editor here at BioCentury. Let's get to it. Steven, we've had about four years in a row where we're like, yay. We can make a comeback, but people think it can stick this time. Break it down for us. Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. Yeah. As you say, there's been I think in the story I counted, we've maybe said five false starts sort of over the past four years where people thought there was a chance the market was finally in a recovery, and then something always happened that, you know, shot it down and, sent everyone back to the doldrums. And so sort of in hindsight looking back here, I mean, we can definitely say that biotech is now fully in recovery mode. I think we can say. Tech Index has, you know, finally outperformed the broader markets last year. You know, the XBI was even better than, not only was it better than tech and sort of the S and P, I mean, it even beat the Magnificent Seven, which are the, you know, the seven tech stocks, AI stocks that, were up 25% last year. Whereas if you look at the XBI, it was about 36% for the year and up 83% from its trough in April. So I think it's clear we can say that that the recovery is underway. Now, the main question that we were then looking at was why won't this be another false start for the sector? There were a couple key points and I'll just mention them here briefly and then we can maybe dig into them. But one was about this enthusiasm for sort of a new cohorts of commercial growth stories of of new companies that are in early launch phase where there's a significant opportunity for them to see sort of rapid revenue growth and so that is one thing that's very, very enticing from the investors perspective. Continued M and A was another strong theme. We saw a ton of deals this past year, and there's every expectation that those are gonna continue into 2026. And then just the capital capital formation, I mean, part of that being, you know, a rotation sort of from generalist more into biotech and that being able to then fuel more follow ons, the potential for IPO's this year. And then finally, when we look at sort of what could potentially halt the momentum, there were a number of things over the past several years that were kind of overhangs for the sector. You know, whether they were sort of …