One year ago, after being burned by disappointing sales of drugs like Dendreon Corp.’s Provenge and Human Genome Sciences Inc.’s Benlysta, investors swore off biotechs in the midst of a commercial launch. The savvy strategy was to make money selling biotech stocks at the inflection point of drug approval rather than betting on a drug’s longer-term commercial potential, and “short the launch” became the mantra of the day.
But over the last 12 months, biotech has been cranking out new drugs, and a few have gotten off to...