The ghosts of JPMs past: How 20 years of deals, scandal, and science have shaped health care
Biotech is celebrating a platinum anniversary next week: 20 years since J.P. Morgan took over the industry’s biggest conference, an annual ritual of brokered mergers, broken promises, and breakthrough science.
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is more than a venue for deals. It’s a place where fierce arguments break out, where industry memes get made, and where biotech examines its warts and wrinkles.
With that in mind, STAT decided to look back at the record. What emerged was not just a series of recollections about a conference, but the history of an industry, chock-full of lessons about management, leadership, and communication. Over the past two decades, many of the biggest heroes and villains in the pharmaceutical industry have graced the stages of the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where the conference has been held since it began 38 years ago under the auspices of Hambrecht & Quist, a now largely forgotten investment bank.
J.P. Morgan’s tenure started when the current crop of pharmaceutical giants were only just being created in a consolidation wave. The conference witnessed the 2000s crisis around drug safety, the era’s big biotech boom, and the birth of a thriving sector. And today, for better or worse, it is still where the action happens.
Here, then, are some specters from JPMs past.
2000-2001: The beginning and end of the genome boom
Genetics at the turn of the century felt like an insurgence. At H&Q in 2000, Roy Whitfield, the CEO of a tiny startup called Incyte, bragged that his company had “revolutionized drug target discovery,” adding: “We have sequenced, patented, and broadly licensed more genes than anyone else in this first critical phase of the genomics revolution.”
Incyte’s stock price quadrupled in the first few months of 2000, giving it a market capitalization approaching $8 billion. Other gene database companies similarly saw enormous appreciation. Mark Levin, the CEO of Millennium, boasted the company’s genomic platform would deliver an approvable drug every year. In May 2001,
