There’s no pleasing some people

Biogen, the sizable biotech company constantly pressured to buy things, spent $800 million on a gene therapy company yesterday morning. And by 4 p.m. ET, it had lost $1.3 billion in market value, which is to say the market did not consider that to be a worthwhile use of money.

Whether Biogen’s acquisition of Nightstar Therapeutics proves accretive in the end remains to be seen, but the Day One reaction is illustrative of how Big Biotech can never seem to win the news cycle.

Major buyouts — like the one that made Juno Therapeutics part of Celgene and Kite Pharma part of Gilead Sciences — have lost their luster in recent months, with investors quite reasonably disappointed by the early returns on such expensive agreements. And yet more conservative deals, like Biogen’s most recent or Alexion’s acquisition of Syntimmune, have consistently been met with indifference, all of which puts biotech’s leading lights in an awkward position when the quarterly “What are you going to buy?” rolls around.