Biotech Values

[corpstrat]

Yes, in a perfect world all biotechs would push their programs forward and the market would fund them if they looked to be probabilistically positive-NPV projects. This is not a perfect world. Delay of a promising program in theory destroys some long-term value. But if you never get to the long term because the shorts have starved you well before that, well prudence dictates biting off only what you can safely chew.

Even behemoths like Amgen in its heyday had to curtail or delay programs that looked promising at the time, because revenues would not support all that they wanted to do and the market would have had a conniption if earnings had dropped. It's hard to navigate these things well, especially if the central case does not work out, as usually happens given the uncertainties of biology and the FDA. This partly in answer to Dew's point earlier about avoiding getting one's ass in a crack (not his words, obviously). Good aspiration, not so easy to implement!