You're asking a lot of important questions and I'll take a stab at answering them.
The discovery of a new molecule or invention of a new method for treating disease is about 5-10% of the effort required to bring a drug to market. Yes, it's clearly not possible to bring a drug to market if it has not been invented, so it's essential to the process, but the difficulty shepherding this new thing through to commercial approval is fraught with difficulties. Universities and hospitals don't have the right talent to do this, nor do they have the resources or the risk tolerance so they sell some of the future gains to a company through licensing for money now. This is how almost all drugs are developed now-a-days, through licensing deals from the inventing parties. This brings the drug to market a lot faster, helping patients more quickly, and reduces the risk of development failure which would prevent patients from getting the drug.
On your second question, the biotech space is small and the number of investing analysts are also small in number. This means you can get a sense of the entire space by following a handful of people on twitter or by email. If you're in the business, you knew who's working on what. Biotech is unlike high-tech in that you need capital to do the work. Making an app can be done by a single person in their apartment. Making a drug requires millions of dollars, special lab equipment, the right people, being in a hub, etc.
In terms of insider trading, the SEC has strict rules on trading on non-public information and compartmentalizing this kind of information to a small group of people who have their trading accounts basically always watched by regulators. Every year a number of biotech employees go to jail for insider trading, so it clearly happens but the SEC is really vigilant on pursing it. The people who profited from this are likely the employees of the company and the investors. They didn't need insider trading as much as they needed to be in biotech, live in the Boston area, want a job working on gene therapy, and work for the company. It's like asking how did people make money off Facebook, or any other company that started-up and made it big.
The discovery of a new molecule or invention of a new method for treating disease is about 5-10% of the effort required to bring a drug to market. Yes, it's clearly not possible to bring a drug to market if it has not been invented, so it's essential to the process, but the difficulty shepherding this new thing through to commercial approval is fraught with difficulties. Universities and hospitals don't have the right talent to do this, nor do they have the resources or the risk tolerance so they sell some of the future gains to a company through licensing for money now. This is how almost all drugs are developed now-a-days, through licensing deals from the inventing parties. This brings the drug to market a lot faster, helping patients more quickly, and reduces the risk of development failure which would prevent patients from getting the drug.
On your second question, the biotech space is small and the number of investing analysts are also small in number. This means you can get a sense of the entire space by following a handful of people on twitter or by email. If you're in the business, you knew who's working on what. Biotech is unlike high-tech in that you need capital to do the work. Making an app can be done by a single person in their apartment. Making a drug requires millions of dollars, special lab equipment, the right people, being in a hub, etc.
In terms of insider trading, the SEC has strict rules on trading on non-public information and compartmentalizing this kind of information to a small group of people who have their trading accounts basically always watched by regulators. Every year a number of biotech employees go to jail for insider trading, so it clearly happens but the SEC is really vigilant on pursing it. The people who profited from this are likely the employees of the company and the investors. They didn't need insider trading as much as they needed to be in biotech, live in the Boston area, want a job working on gene therapy, and work for the company. It's like asking how did people make money off Facebook, or any other company that started-up and made it big.