On Wednesday we wrote about Oura, the ring maker that put off its IPO when it couldn't get its price. Turn to B4 of Friday's Journal and the door it found shut is wide open a few aisles over. William Blair counts 23 biotech IPOs through the first three quarters — close to three times the eight in the whole of 2025 — and TRex Bio and Retension Pharmaceuticals are lining up to join them this week. Same market, opposite answer, and a good part of the difference is where the cash is.
Brian Gormley's piece explains the cash. Until this year biotech listings had mostly dried up — FDA cuts and the administration's drive to lower drug prices made 2025 an uncertain year to ask strangers for money — and investors have since learned to account for both, says Dr. Brian Abrahams, global sector head of healthcare research at RBC Capital Markets. A burst of biotech buyouts this year has also put cash back in investors' pockets, analysts say. “A lot of funds are flush with capital that they need to deploy,” says William Blair's Kevin Eisele. Read that twice: money looking for a home tells you about the supply of cash, not the odds on any one drug. To be fair to this year's class, the Journal calls it particularly strong for a concrete reason — these companies pushed drugs into clinical trials while they waited out the drought.
One trial, one buyout, one day
Thursday showed both ends of the single-stock bet. Argenx (ARGX), the Amsterdam company whose Vyvgart brought in $4.2 billion last year, halted a late-stage trial of the drug in Sjogren's disease after an independent data-monitoring committee concluded the study would miss its primary goal. No new safety signal; the drug just wasn't working well enough there. The shares closed down nearly 12%, at $818.63, wiping out the year's gain — a company with a blockbuster already on the market, losing a year's gains in a day on an expansion that didn't work. Separately on Thursday, Argenx said a celiac drug from its $2.2 billion Forte Biosciences deal is moving to late-stage trials. Same coin, other side.
Then Pacira BioSciences (PCRX), from B10's Stock Spotlight. The pain-drug maker jumped 44% — the top percentage gainer in the Journal's tables — once Viatris (VTRS) agreed to buy it for $1.65 billion. It closed at $36.39, up $11.19, on volume 4837% above its 65-day average; Viatris slipped 5 cents to $17.44. No earnings report, no trial readout: a buyer agreed to pay for the whole company, and the stock did more in one session than the NYSE Arca Biotech index has done all year — up 26.7% in 2026, after Thursday's 1.26% slip.
Our read
This is Investments/Risk (IN04) with a behavioral core, and Thursday's two prints are the lesson: a single drug stock — even one with a $4.2 billion product on the market — is a coin with a prospectus. Heads, a buyer shows up and you're up 44% by the close; tails, a monitoring committee takes the year's gains by the closing bell. You can't know which in advance — that's what a trial is for. The IPO newcomers are earlier-stage still, with less on the shelf to fall back on.
Our verdict is avoid, aimed at the single-stock bet and not the sector. Health care is owned in the practice through Eli Lilly (LLY) in 23 of 81 model books, AbbVie (ABBV) in 23, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) in 25, AstraZeneca (AZN) in 20, Amgen (AMGN) in 5 and through funds; none of Argenx, Pacira or Viatris is held, and nothing is added this edition. General principles, not advice: if you want a piece of a drug that might work, a fund lets one halted trial be a dent instead of the whole story. And if a single biotech in your account has grown bigger than you meant it to be, Thursday was the reminder that the exit is easier to plan before the data-monitoring committee calls. The umbrella goes in the car on the sunny day.