The biggest healthcare investor conference starts on Monday — here are the top 5 areas we're keeping an eye on

Jamie Dimon

The annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference kicks off on January 7 in San Francisco.
The event is the start to an already-busy year for biotech, pharma, and healthcare executives.
From Amazon's healthcare ambitions, to who will pull off the next mega-merger, here's what we expect to hear a lot about next week.

Starting Monday, thousands of pharmaceutical industry executives, investors, bankers, and analysts will swarm into San Francisco for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

Now in its 37th year, the conference has ballooned from a small event with 150 attendees that was essentially the "birth of biotech," to an event attended by everyone from the biggest pharma company to the smallest biotech. JPMorgan said more than 485 companies are scheduled to present this year.

It's a spot for these companies to meet with investors and each other, and can be the starting point for takeovers or other deals.

It's also a place where more deals — maybe even on the scale of Thursday's $74 billion merger between Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene — could get announced.

From confronting the threat of technology giants' healthcare advances to covering the cost of one-time treatments, here are some of the key topics we'll be asking about this week.

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Who’s next to merge?

2018 saw a number of mega-deals, including the $77 billion Takeda-Shire merger. Now with the BMS-Celgene deal in place, the healthcare industry is wondering who might be next to pair up.

"With large caps, generally, falling under pressure the last few years, one has to acknowledge the potential for additional consolidation of profitable companies," Baird Equity Research biotech analyst Brian Skorney wrote in a note Thursday.

Alternatively, Celgene could find another dance partner in a counter-bid.

Alethia Young, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald remarked in a note Thursday that it's possible others go in to big on Celgene — specifically Amgen and Johnson & Johnson. That's in large part because of the two companies focus on hematology. Joining up with either of those two companies could create more synergies than the company has with BMS.

How will we pay for seven-figure drugs? What about other costly treatments?

The issue of paying for medications is now a constant conversation for the drug industry, with prices continuing to go up even after political pressure in 2018. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on pharma's 2019 plans.

But a new wrinkle that's quickly coming into focus: How are we going to pay for one-time treatments?

Already, treatments like cell therapy for cancer treatments and a gene therapy for a hereditary form of blindness have tested the waters.

But more are in the works. That includes Novartis' gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic condition that affects muscle movement in children and is the leading genetic cause of mortality in infants that could be approved in the US by as early as May 2019. When that happens, Novartis said it would be cost-effective at a price of between $4-5 million.

It might take some new payment arrangements to get health insurers on board to cover the cost of treatment, such as paying in installments over a set amount of time. What that looks like and who takes the lead on that will be a big question that should get answered in 2019.

How has the pharma-payer power dynamic shifted?

In 2018, two massive healthcare deals closed, redrawing the lines around what defines a healthcare company:

The health insurer Cigna combined with Express Scripts, which manages pharmacy benefits. And CVS Health, a big pharmacy chain that also owns a drug benefits business, acquired the health insurer Aetna.

We'll find out a lot more this year about the strategies of the combined companies. Both new firms will be looking for places to cut costs, as well as seeking to gain more control over how patients access healthcare. It's happening at a time when new medications are getting approved that challenge the way we pay for treatments.

It remains to be seen how the two newly formed healthcare companies wield their new negotiating power, and how drugmakers will respond to that increased pressure.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider