The 2022 wave com­ing? Top an­a­lyst says Big Phar­ma will have more than $1T avail­able to sat­is­fy its grow­ing ap­petite for biotech M&A

All through this year you could prac­ti­cal­ly feel the frus­tra­tion of the biotech in­vestor class as M&A ac­tiv­i­ty con­tin­ued to drag be­hind ex­pec­ta­tions — or de­sires. Buy­outs of pub­lic com­pa­nies pro­vide the es­sen­tial juice for keep­ing stocks live­ly, and there’s been a no­table lack of juice in 2021.

So is all that about to change, big time?

SVB Leerink’s Ge­of­frey Porges, a long­time stu­dent of biotech M&A, thinks so. In a lengthy analy­sis he put out last week, Porges tot­ted up the cash flow of the ma­jor phar­mas and de­ter­mined that there was a good long list of in­dus­try buy­ers who would have around a half tril­lion dol­lars of cash to play with in 2022. Lever­age that up with added debt and you could get that deal cache to $1.6 tril­lion.

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