The investment bank Jefferies had been running its healthcare conference in London for 14 years as a reasonably intimate gathering of healthcare investors, biotech and medtech financial officers, and industry affiliates.
Then everything changed.
It was last year that saw a surge of attendees, with 3,600 people turning up over three days. In response, Jefferies expanded the conference beyond the confines of the original venue—the century-old Waldorf Hotel—to absorb a number of other buildings around London’s tourist-friendly theater district.
Once again, attendance has jumped this year, with an estimated 4,500 people from 50 countries and across 950 healthcare companies set to show up. The organizers didn’t leave anything to chance. The array of add-on venues have been reused (including the media room in a Brazilian steakhouse, from where Fierce is writing to you) but with greater coordination that means last year’s endless queues are a thing of the past.
As well as some unseasonal sunshine, the event’s newfound confidence was reflected in an extended run of events spread across four days.
The conference kicked off with a Monday focused solely on biotechs, which resulted in a reasonably subdued opener. But, by Tuesday, the conference was firing on all cylinders.
You had to feel sorry for the families of tourists searching for a cozy café to escape the cold, only to find them swamped by smart suits and drowned out by chatter about gene therapies. Even when Fierce escaped to a Victorian pub in the heart of nearby Covent Garden—London’s first public square that is now an Instagram-able shopping destination—we couldn’t help but overhear a conversation about the biopharma financing landscape.
Fierce's own meetings with Jefferies attendees included trekking from a hotel lobby festooned with Winston Churchill memorabilia to a restaurant located opposite the theater where Bram Stoker worked when he wrote Dracula.
Law firm Baker McKenzie first started coming to the conference around seven years ago and has seen its transformation firsthand.
“It’s on the calendar now,” Jane Hobson, partner at Baker McKenzie’s London M&A Group, told Fierce over a coffee in a restaurant swarming with Jefferies-related business meetings.
“It’s not just about the conference, it's about the eco-structure that comes with it,” Hobson explained. “I go through my list of contacts across all my clients and just write to them saying, ‘Will you be in London?’ They all are.”
Last year was the first time that Fierce heard attendees describe the conference as a warm-up to J.P. Morgan’s Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, and that comparison kept coming up again in conversations this week.
John Oyler, co-founder and CEO of BeOne Medicines—the new name for BeiGene—was blunt.
“JPM is a meeting that everyone goes to and everyone hates, but it has a role and it's important,” he told Fierce.
“From that perspective, I think there's a sense that this meeting has a more European and global flavor, and is a little bit more accessible to be able to spend time with some of the people you're focused on,” Oyler said.
Diane Weiser, head of corporate affairs at cardiovascular biotech Cytokinetics, said the conference has “definitely ballooned” in recent years.
“We started attending several years ago because it was sort of known as the J.P. Morgan of London,” she told Fierce. “I think it used to be more of an opportunity to meet European investors.”
“It's not really like that as much anymore,” she added. “Actually, it's pretty much the usual suspects that we will see at J.P. Morgan.”
For 2025, Forbion—a European life-sciences-focused VC firm—is splitting up its conference attendance, with half the team heading to Jefferies’ event this week and half waiting for J.P. Morgan in January.
“I was a regular at J. P. Morgan, but I must admit, I only started to attend Jefferies a couple years ago,” Sander Slootweg, Forbion managing partner and co-owner, told Fierce.
“For Europeans, this is around the corner,” Slootweg said. “For Americans, it's a good way to touch base with all their European contacts in one go.”
“London is a very welcoming town with great facilities for receptions [and] dinners,” he continued. “So I think it's just grown in popularity—probably because Europe felt that it needed something, well, not to compete, but to at least offer an alternative to everyone having to travel all the way to the U.S. West Coast once a year.”
One of the first-time attendees this week was Tim Hunt, CEO of the Washington D.C.-based Regenerative Medicines Alliance.
“The word that's gotten out is it's a bit like the J.P. Morgan of Europe,” he told Fierce to explain his decision to make the transatlantic journey.
“It seems to be a very good convening,” he added. “There's a lot of people here that we know in the cell and gene therapy community. A number of board members are here … and people that are thinking about joining arms.”
One major difference between this week’s London conference and the sprawling J.P. Morgan event in January is the number of Big Pharma deals that are announced to coincide with the San Francisco gathering.
Sitting down with Fierce in the warren of cramped meeting rooms in the Waldorf hotel, BeOne’s Oyler suggested that some of the headlines coming out of JPM may actually be the result of a “deal that was done here and isn't announced until then.”
Who knows—if the Jefferies conference continues to cement its status in the biopharma calendar, could we see late November have its own mini wave of deal announcements?
“Everyone wants to announce a deal just before J.P. Morgan,” Baker McKenzie’s Hobson pointed out. “I wonder if we’ll get to the point where everyone wants to announce a deal just before [Jefferies]?”