Tomorrow evening’s 6 p.m. EDT release of abstracts ahead of ASCO’s annual meeting has investors and health bloggers alike on pins and needles. John Carroll of FierceBiotech describes this as a data dump to “make a few fortunes and lose others.”
While once only provided only to members of ASCO, this privileged information is now released to the public. This change resulted from the historic dissemination of abstracts to opportunistic investors. On titles alone, certain stocks have surged ahead of the meeting, according to The Street‘s Adam Feuerstein. Come tomorrow evening, analysts will hop online and “rush to glean winners and losers.”
In this case, the abstract actually becomes a tool for investor relations — not merely an application to present. This is the preview for investors that can excite them ahead of ‘the big dance.’ Feuerstein adds a caveat that the early deadline for ASCO abstracts means that companies will “want to present data that isn’t fully analyzed yet.” This forces both companies to build an abstract strategically and investors to keep their analysis smart, not too enthusiastic.
Of course, Feuerstein reminds us that the meeting itself brings us a round of late-breaking abstracts and the real, fully-analyzed data sets. This continues to drive stock prices on the heels of the abstracts and forms the basis for the media’s treatment of all of the cancer drugs in development.
Data presented to a “packed auditorium of 15,000 people” (in the case of Genentech’s Herceptin a few years ago) will certainly captivate media attention more so than a poster sitting in a dark corner. The media may assign significance to data based on the size of the crowd that turns up to the presentation, and invitations to present are generally based on the quality of the abstract. While the media is not the primary audience for data, they are the filter that can transmit the information gleaned at ASCO to analysts and investors not in attendance.
The data is the turkey dinner, but the abstract serves to whet the palate.
