The power (and weakness) of narrative in biotech

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The power (and weakness) of narrative in biotech<br>The life-changing magic of "so what"

Paul Agapow<br>Aug 06, 2026

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But where are all the AI-designed drugs?

The world we now live in:<br>A vocal number of commentators who spent the last two years waxing enthusiastic about AI-designed drugs are now publicly wondering, in apparent confusion, where the AI drugs actually are. Or stroking their chins and sagely noting that, of course, the bottleneck was always data, or clinical development, or some other thing they failed to mention back then.1

The lauded founders of a darling biotech suddenly announce they are departing to start a new venture. What actually happened in the boardroom is not announced. However, industry figures and experts praise the timing and strategy of the transition, studiously ignoring the desultory trial results and bleeding cash reserves sitting behind the curtain.

“Anthropic is now a biotech” zombie posts bounce around LinkedIn, bereft of any explanation of what it means or why anyone should care.

Consultancy whitepapers explain that AI will revolutionize drug development, with detailed charts and numbers attached, but no real account of how these were arrived at.

A pharma company or biotech announces some blue sky target (100 drugs in our pipeline, doing $30B in revenue) and the commentariat praises them for their vision and ignores that it’s mere press release puffery, designed to short up the stock price.

Investors and analysts talking up a new drug class or modality with the certainty of people describing something that has already happened, rather than something that might, while ignoring their earlier and equally certain deliberations on the previous new class or modality.

Most of this doesn’t qualify as news in any real sense. It’s speculation dressed up as reporting, commentary about commentary. There isn’t enough genuinely new, true information in biopharma on any given day to fill the volume of posts and newsletters and opinion pieces claiming to deliver it. Necessarily, most of what circulates has to be noise.<br>Of course, none of this is new, and none of it is unique to biotech. William Goldman, who spent decades writing and doctoring Hollywood scripts, had a blunt aphorism about the movie business: nobody knows anything. Every time someone explained why a film worked, or didn’t, they were making it up after the fact. The reasons given were stories, built to fit the results.<br>Biopharma commentary runs on the same trick. Something happens, and within a day there is a tidy, authoritative explanation circulating on LinkedIn, in an investor newsletter, in a trade press quote. It’s not that biotech and drug development is utterly random and facts are irrelevant. It’s that the immediate, neat explanations are almost always a construction, put together after the fact to fit an event nobody saw coming2. It’s that press releases aren’t news but an attempt to set a narrative3.

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The AstraZeneca-BMS rumor

Recent weeks gave a clean example of the narrative machine running in real time. Reports surfaced that AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb had held preliminary merger talks4. The commentary that followed was instant and confident. Analysts explained why the deal made sense for BMS (patent cliffs on Eliquis and Opdivo, a need to offset revenue erosion) and why it made much less sense for AstraZeneca (a market-leading pipeline, no obvious need for financial engineering) although maybe it did (a US-listing play tied to AstraZeneca’s recent move to the NYSE). Some called it perplexing5. AstraZeneca’s shares fell as much as 7% on the news, one of its worst single-day drops in years. Perversely, BMS rose about 6%.<br>Some of this may turn out to be approximately right. But nobody commenting had detailed knowledge of the actual negotiations, the actual motivations of the two boards, details of the deal, or whether the deal will happen at all. Within a day, the market had a fully formed narrative, built on a single-sourced vague report of ill-defined discussions held at some point in recent months6.<br>Or put it this way: you, I or any one of a number of people could have started that rumor, with no basis in reality. So why are we all talking about something that is near-on phlogiston?<br>The commentary economy

A messy, uncertain, multi-causal event is hard to write about and hard to read about. A clean story with a villain, a hero, a trend, a moral is easy to produce and easy to consume. Journalists have deadlines. Analysts have clients who want a view. The thought-leaderati need material for posts. They all need to show that they know things. The system rewards confident takes over “beats me.” Having opinions, loudly and often, gets you attention7. We’re so ready to hear stories and explanations that we hunt them down whether they’re true or not.8<br>There’s a pattern here worth calling out: the...