Episode 175 - March 6, 2026

You're listening to Biotech Hangout, a live and unedited weekly discussion of all the latest news in our industry with a group of biotech leaders and experts. I'm Michael Yee at UBS, and my cohost today are Eric Schmidt, Yaron Warbur, and Matt Gline. For more information about our host and guest speakers or to listen to the most recent episode, please go to biotechhangout.com. While a bunch of different speakers are getting connected with us, I would love to just get kicked off here. One of the topics we wanted to chat about and certainly is an important topic in the investment community is about all of the volatility in the sector. However, the fact that, biotech continues to perform well, and there are important positive capital markets developments going on. So, based on, the last few months, obviously, the, stock market, S and P 500, has been quite volatile. And, for everybody that has been so, focused on the AI trade and all that has been the rage for the last couple of years. The AI trade has a lot of debate and controversy, everything from is it a bubble to what are the other downstream industries that are gonna get hit. Large cap software and all these other industries that I see are getting impacted. Biotech has been a bright spot, pharma and biotech. And to point to that as it relates to, the capital markets, not only is the XBI been a pretty good performer, in the last six months, and the XBI, had a great run, obviously, over the last six months. Importantly for us and for a lot of the companies out there, the capital markets and fundraising environment has been quite good. In the fourth quarter, it was pretty remarkable because we saw $10,000,000,000 in total follow on activity, which was approaching the peak of early, '24 and is matching some of the numbers that we saw in the beginning of COVID. So despite, a tough biotech, past couple of years, biotech has definitely picked up, and the follow on activity is quite robust in the fourth quarter. We also, put out a note highlighting that in q one, appreciating that we're not fully through the quarter, we have done, we, I mean, the stock market has done $2,000,000,000 of IPOs, and we're approaching about a $2,500,000,000 run rate for the quarter, which would be the highest single quarter in the past few years. Let me repeat that again. Biotech had the strongest single quarter for IPO activity and dollars raised, approximating 2,500,000,000.0 for IPOs, in the past four years. So that's pretty remarkable, definitely worth talking about. And, obviously, the question will be, can it continue? And and, we've been talking about that. We've been saying, we think a bunch of tailwinds are certainly turning toward the positive, and biotech should be a pretty good, sector, certainly the larger companies and the smaller companies, this year. And I will throw in obviously …