Episode 186 - June 12, 2026

Summary

• Biotech is quietly winning within healthcare: the XBI is up ~10.5% year-to-date, only ~70bps behind the NASDAQ and ~350bps ahead of the S&P 500, while healthcare overall is down 0.4%. Parabilis Medicines set a fresh IPO record at $771M—topping the $719M obesity raise from two months ago—just five months after a $305M Series F, and ~12 IPOs raising $4B+ by midyear leaves what Eric Schmidt calls a “Goldilocks scenario”: “selective, quality-driven, and data-oriented, but not closed.”
• Paul Matteis flags a subtle regime change: binary catalysts that eight or nine weeks ago would have compensated investors “unequivocally” are now trading sideways or down, and the buy side is asking whether to “play a little bit more defense” into H2. Eric’s bull-market arc—launch stories in 2025, “shiny pipeline” assets in 2026, platform stocks and “science projects again” in 2027—drew Paul’s uneasy question: “Is that the end of a bull market there?” Eric: “I think we all fear that.”
• Summit pulled a ~$500M offering after its ASCO plenary data drew a destructive U.S. KOL discussion, leaving the company “half-pregnant with the need to raise capital” into the binary global HARMONi-3 readout at year-end. Eric thought the data themselves were “very good” and mused that the discussant may have cost the company “billions of dollars” of market value; Paul’s BD lesson from experience at large companies is that cash is negotiating leverage—without it, strategics can “dictate terms.”
• Tango’s PRMT5 inhibitor plus Revolution Medicines’ multi-RAS inhibitor posted a 90%+ response rate in MTAP-deleted pancreatic cancer (~40% of PDAC patients)—“off the charts” versus historical teens-to-20s—alongside a $500M-plus Tango offering and several hundred million dollars raised by IDEAYA on the same data. Eric argues “1 plus 1 equals 3” pushes Tango and Revolution Medicines toward cooperation rather than rivalry, and calls RAS the pathway “most ripe for deals”—with J&J’s acquisition of Firefly, whose lead asset is a RAS inhibitor from a degrader platform, as an example.
• Incyte’s up-to-$2B purchase of Star’s subsidiary Vega ($1.25B upfront) is new CEO Bill Meury’s opening move—Graig Suvannavejh says Meury told him, “you should consider us as the first of several.” VGA039’s monthly infusion for von Willebrand disease could be a blockbuster as Jakafi comes off patent “as early as 2028.”
• GSK’s roughly $10B-plus Nuvalent takeout ($124/share, ~$9.4B enterprise value) is Luke Miels’ “biggest swing yet” back into oncology—and, per Oliver Barnes, effectively an arbitrage on peak-sales variance: bears at ~$2B, bulls at $5–6B. Eric’s verdict on a decade of dabbling after the 2014 Novartis asset-swap exit—Tesaro, Sierra Oncology and IDRx—is that “with Nuvalent, they’re fully in”; GSK probably needs more oncology assets to become a real player.
• Oliver’s view on M&A leaks: most have no strategic logic—“the closer you get to a deal being announced, the more people know about it,” and human nature makes people loose-lipped. His health warning for retail is to trust outlets with rigorous verification, including the FT, the Journal and Bloomberg; publications with one-in-ten or two-in-ten hit rates are “generally not worth your time.”
• The regulatory-flexibility trade may be turning back on for genetic medicine—Paul says “it feels like the scale is tilting back” in light of Marks leaving, while Novartis’ FSHD biomarker data led Eric to say, “this drug should be approved in my opinion.” Neurogene completed pivotal Rett dosing, with no early recurrence so far of the severe inflammatory event seen at a higher dose, though follow-up continues. The brutal flip side: Sensorion discontinued its otoferlin hearing-loss program because Regeneron got to market first and is giving its therapy away for free.

Deep dive

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