How will biotech’s latest bubble go pop? We asked some experts

A five-year bull run in biotech has made scientists into millionaires, booked bonuses for bankers, and put venture capitalists into increasingly fancy cars. But in an industry prone to booms and busts, insiders with long memories aren’t getting too comfortable.

“I’m seeing a lot of investors making a lot of assumptions that may be accurate, but these assumptions are now becoming the consensus, and if anything goes wrong, there’s a long way down,” said Josh Schimmer, a biotech analyst at Evercore ISI.

The Nasdaq Biotech Index has more than doubled since 2013, flirting with all-time highs in January. VCs put more than $10 billion into biotech in 2017 — a record sum, according to data provider Pitchbook — and private firms raised more in the last two months than in all of 2013.

That kind of investor exuberance stokes fears that a correction is in the cards.

But what kind of correction? In the early 2000s, the end of the genomics