Biotech had a bad European getaway

The drug industry decamped to Munich for an annual cancer conference and came back about $1 billion poorer.

That was the toll of ESMO, Europe’s answer to the stateside ASCO meeting, once the markets opened yesterday morning. The problem, broadly, was that a new crop of in-development cancer drugs didn’t measure up to their perceived promise. Aduro Biotech lost more than $100 million in market value thanks to Merck, which posted puzzling results on a drug similar to one in Aduro’s pipeline. Adaptimmune shed more than $200 million from disappointing results in immunotherapy, and Mirati Therapeutics lost about the same amount on some murky data.

Beyond the dollars and cents of Wall Street’s reaction, the industry’s costly weekend abroad underscores one of the themes of 2018: Finding cancer treatments that can improve the standard of care is proving to be a taller task than scientists once thought.