Big Pharmas typically don’t get a lot of respect for R&D efforts. Their ROI is bad on a massive annual bill, there’s too much late-stage failure, analysts fret about the endurance of big franchises and the impact of generic competition.

Even as Pascal Soriot is staunching the bleeding around a badly handled Phase III readout for their Covid-19 vaccine, though, the AstraZeneca CEO is taking a bow today as Cowen lavishes praise on the pipeline and near-term prospects for the multinational — for the second year in a row.

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Eighteen days ago, virtually all of the outside experts on an FDA adcomm got together to mug the agency’s Billy Dunn and the Biogen team when they presented their upbeat assessment on aducanumab. But here we are, more than 2 weeks later, and the ongoing debate over that Alzheimer’s drug’s fate continues unabated.

Instead of simply ruling out any chance of an approval, the logical conclusion based on what we heard during that session, a series of questionable approvals that preceded the controversy over the agency’s recent EUA decisions has come back to haunt the FDA, where the power of precedent is leaving an opening some experts believe can still be exploited by the big biotech.

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If you ask anyone in drug development about what motivates them — or even if you don’t — you’re going to get a regular double-barreled blast about patients and unmet medical needs if you’re covering this industry. Less discussed and just as important during a heady IPO boom is a shot at the overnight fortunes that are on offer in the middle of a pandemic.

Sean Bohen’s team at Olema just spelled it all out in an S-1 that can serve as a compactly written handbook on the subject — provided you know the background.

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2020 will stand out in the history of biotech for a variety of reasons, starting with the unprecedented, rapid-fire response to Covid-19. But somewhere in the top 5 there will be a special spotlight on the IPO boom, which has been funneling billions of dollars into drug development and offering some key players a shot at rock star status — and rock star money.

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The last I had heard about Sean Bohen, he had stepped out of his high-profile job as chief medical officer at AstraZeneca at the beginning of 2019 as CEO Pascal Soriot triggered a broad-ranging R&D shakeup. And then, earlier this week, I got a chance to catch up.

It turns out that Bohen decided at the time that he would not just jump into a new job in the booming biopharma business. As an oncologist, he had worked on the big programs at AstraZeneca, and before that he was at Genentech. That was good for a ticket to just about anyplace in the big biopharma world. But he felt it was time to stop and think things through.

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