One Year Later: Whatever Happened To Those Biotech Companies?

News moves fast on the Internet, and it’s especially true in biotechnology. It’s hard to keep up with all the headlines, much less put them in context. Regular readers will probably chuckle, but I sometimes find it hard to remember things I’ve written about that are more than a year old.

So, since I started writing for Forbes in January 2015, I thought it would be useful to look back at some of those stories from a little over a year ago and follow up.

Here are a few that caught my eye.

Q&A With Jay Flatley, CEO Of Illumina , The Genomics Company Pursuing A $20 Billion Market (Apr. 29, 2015)

Illumina CEO Jay Flatley spoke with me in some depth last spring about the company’s ambitions to continue building on its momentum in DNA sequencing. (For the full interview, you can subscribe to Timmerman Report). At the time a year ago, Flatley estimated the market at an eye-opening $20 billion. Since then, the company has stayed in an aggressive stance. Illumina joined Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and others in an audacious $100 million investment in a cancer screening company called Grail. Illumina also announced plans to further its technological advantage by moving into semiconductor-based sequencing technology. Recently, Flatley announced his plans to move upstairs to become executive chairman, clearing the way for No. 2 executive Francis de Souza to become CEO.

See Ya Later, Techies: Atlas Venture Goes It Alone, Scoops up $280M for Biotech (Apr. 17, 2015)

Atlas Venture was one of many biotech venture capital firms last year that tapped into bullish sentiment at the time, raising new funds from limited partners eager to ride the biotech wave. The market has cooled since, but Atlas has cashed in on a couple of earlier portfolio bets–Padlock Therapeutics and Nimbus Therapeutics–which surely won’t hurt its ability to keep putting more capital to work in biotech startups.

Cancer Immunotherapy Is All Over the Science News. Now it Has its Own Stock Index (Apr. 7, 2015)

Investor Brad Loncar, an avid follower of cancer immunotherapy companies, noticed more than a year ago that there wasn’t an easy way to track all the interesting companies seeking to harness the immune system as an emerging form of cancer treatment. So he created a stock index with small and large companies. He followed that up a few months later by creating an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that serves like a diversified basket of stocks that investors can buy, instead of placing more risky bets on individual stocks. These are early days for the ETF, and the early returns aren’t good, but that has more to do with a broader downturn in the market than anything. Scientists are still extremely excited about the possibilities in immunotherapy, as you could see from the coverage this month of the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting.

Tech is From Mars, Biotech is From Venus. A Handy Guide to Busting the Jargon (Mar. 19, 2015)

This was a fun story about the language barrier between tech and biotech people. Some things don’t change much in a year’s time.

Amgen, Regeneron Stocks Go Up as Drugs Bring Cholesterol Down (Mar. 16, 2015)

Amgen and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals were jockeying to win over physicians last spring at a medical meeting, touting some impressive data on their new cholesterol-lowering drugs aimed at a molecular marker known as PCSK9. There was much talk at the time about which patients might be candidates for these powerful LDL-cholesterol lowering drugs, and how widely they might be used in an era of cheap, generic statins. Both drugs won FDA approval, and both drugs have fallen flat in the marketplace. Insurers dug in their heels against these drugs, with list prices of about $14,000 apiece. Both companies are probably stuck in this rut until long-term cardiovascular outcome studies can answer a basic question: Are the new drugs any better than existing drugs at reducing heart attacks and strokes?

Adaptive Buys Sequenta to Disrupt Cancer Diagnosis, Drug Discovery (Jan. 7, 2015)

Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies acquired a smaller rival to strengthen its immune-sequencing technologies, consolidate some intellectual property, get some smart people on board in the Bay Area and add some strength in cancer diagnostics. A few months later, Adaptive raised $195 million in private financing to further diversify, and use its immune-sequencing technology as the basis for a T-cell-based cancer drug discovery operation. Diego Miralles, the former head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, was hired to run that operation.

Depression Drug That Works In One Day Passes Key Test (Jan. 27, 2015)

This article got the most page views of anything I’ve written for Forbes, and it’s no surprise. More than 20 million people in the U.S. have depression, and the existing drugs don’t work for everyone, and sometimes take several weeks to work when they do. Naurex, a small biotech company in Illinois, reported some encouraging early findings on a drug that seemed to work within 24 hours. Six months after this report, Allergan acquired the company for $560 million.

Merck Bets $450M on Old School Biotech from NGM (Feb. 23, 2015)

Often, I like to write about the investments that Big Pharma companies make in biotech startups, which can be an interesting indicator of where biomedical R&D is heading. Merck made a big investment in South San Francisco-based NGM Biopharmaceuticals, and another in Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna Therapeutics a little more than a year ago. NGM was working on classic biologic molecules, while Moderna is building up capability in making messenger RNA molecules into drugs. NGM has released some data on a drug candidate for primary biliary cirrhosis, and Moderna said in January that it was entering its first clinical trial.