The biotech and pharmaceutical industries had a whiplash 2016 after several consecutive years of record drug approvals and palpable excitement in the sector surrounding innovative new therapies. Skittish investors began pulling investments as the 2016 presidential campaign and several major pricing scandals (and high-profile clinical trial failures) shone a bright light on pharma's practices, sending major biotech ETFs plunging as much as 20% year-to-date.
That's not to say that there weren't also major advances, especially in the cancer drug space and robust government efforts to encourage data-sharing and build up federal repositories of genetic information for research purposes. But, all told, it was a relatively grim year for biopharma by recent standards.
