The (other) question everyone asks of Biogen

Despite being a $63 billion company with a bunch of drugs in development, Biogen routinely gets reduced to a make-or-break bet on a would-be treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. And so investors typically ask two questions: What are you going to buy to diversify, and when are you going to tell us whether that Alzheimer’s drug actually works?

That latter question is only getting louder as we move toward 2020, when a pair of late-stage trials will conclude, because an apparently large faction of Wall Street is hoping that Biogen might conduct an interim analysis on those trials and reveal their results — positive or negative — ahead of schedule. Biogen has never confirmed or denied plans for such an analysis, stringing investors along as they fight amongst themselves about its potential.

As Mizuho analyst Salim Syed writes, that causes anxiety, the fear that “one day we will all wake up to a [Biogen] press release saying that the company has conducted a futility analysis and it failed.” So he did some math, accounting for Biogen’s pace of enrollment and estimating how much data it would need to draw a conclusion. His conclusion: August is the latest Biogen could possibly do a futility analysis, meaning that if there’s no word after that, the world is probably stuck waiting until the process actually concludes.