Matthew Herper  Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff   4/19/2012 @
4:17PM |2,963 views  Why Big Pharma Investors Undervalue Drugs
The following post was written by Mark Schoenebaum, the
biotechnology and pharmaceutical analyst for ISI Group, a
research firm, who sent it as an email to his clients. It has
been edited slightly with his permission.  Since I now cover
both big pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotech firms, I
often find myself comparing Wall Street sales forecasts for
pharma companies versus biotech companies in various
diseases. One of those diseases is hepatitis C, where a great
deal of important data is being presented at a medical
conference in Barcelona.  Here’s a shocking figure: consensus
estimates for Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs are four times (that is
not a typo) those of Bristol-Myers Squibb, despite the fact that
the two companies are neck-and-neck in the race to develop
 hepatitis C medicines.  The consensus estimate for all the
hepatitis C drugs in analysts’ Bristol-Myers model during th