The Biggest Disclosure Day in Biotech

JPM Healthcare is widely considered the biggest week in biotech. One way to quantify how seriously companies treat it is to look at required public disclosures.

Public companies file Form 8-K when they believe new information is material to investors. In biotech, these filings often cover clinical updates, financing events, strategic changes, or presentations. Companies are not required to file for every conference they present at, but many do when they believe the content could affect their stock price.

I track public biotech companies along with their clinical trials, regulatory activity, and SEC filings at RxDataLab. This infrastructure makes it possible to quantify disclosure behavior across the sector. With JPM Healthcare 2026 now over, I looked at biotech disclosure patterns around the conference, and the pattern is striking.

The plot above shows daily biotech 8-K filings over the course of 2025 through the 2026 JPM conference. The bars are colored based on the contents of the 8-K filing. The 8-Ks that focus on financials or earnings are blue, while those announcing presentations or clinical results are orange. Quarterly earnings peaks are prominently blue, and there is a smaller orange peak for the summer conference season. The January JPM Healthcare spikes are an even mix of presentations and financial disclosures.

JPM Opening Day #

After examining a few years of filings patterns, it is clear that the opening day of JPM Healthcare is the single largest 8-K disclosure day for biotech by a wide margin. In 2026, 148 biotech 8-Ks were filed by 145 distinct companies, which is roughly 23% of the 619 public biotechs that RxDataLab tracks. For context, the daily median for 8-Ks is 21 filings per day.

This pattern is remarkably consistent year over year:

• JPM 2024: 141 filings from 136 companies
• JPM 2025: 147 filings from 146 companies
• JPM 2026: 148 filings from 145 companies

Roughly half of the JPM 8-Ks were related to conference presentations, with the remainder split between financial disclosures and other material updates, meaning companies are using JPM to announce both the presentations themselves and general company updates. Some companies filed multiple 8-Ks on the same day, which is why the visualization shows a mix of both colors during JPM week.

Of course, there is no guarantee that every public biotech presenting at JPM Healthcare filed an 8-K, and our data says nothing about private companies. Still, as Michelle Leder, founder of SEC filing watchdog footnoted*, reminds us: “There are no accidents in SEC filings.” Both the timing and contents of disclosures can reveal a lot to careful observers.