At the first day of the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare conference concluded on 12 January, investors and pharma executives gathered in San Francisco remarked on the absence of highly anticipated “mega-deals” thus far. But they also indicated that current market dynamics are providing an incentive for deals to take place.
News reports have suggested Revolution Medicines and Abivax are in talks to be acquired, but no company has confirmed these reports as of 13 January. In the meantime, licensing deals — like between AbbVie and Remegen, or Novartis and SciNeuro — are providing a pathway for big pharma to develop and acquire new assets to strengthen their pipelines.
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During a discussion at the Biotech Showcase event, also held in San Francisco, David Jenkins, SVP and head of external innovation and research at Ipsen, said the mid-sized company has seen a lot more deals activity. Ipsen is deliberately not competing in the same space as the larger pharma companies for $10bn+ deals, but in the smaller ranges there is more competition, largely because companies need to fill pipelines, he added.
Other macro factors are continuing to drive the appetite and incentive for deals. At another discussion in the same event on 12 January, Thomas Barker, partner and co-Chair of the healthcare department at Foley Hoag, said one of the biggest regulatory or policy challenges facing the biopharmaceutical industry is the focus on drug pricing. As the sector oversaw the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) under the former Biden administration and different pricing models like Most Favoured Nation (MFN) in the mix, he said it seemed as if the Trump administration has “doubled down”.
Lori Reilly, COO at PhRMA, said the lobbying organisation’s calls for reforms on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and 340B drug pricing programs are the need of the hour to address high costs for patients at the pharmacy counter. Reilly highlighted the recent US-UK deal, under which the UK’s National Health Services (NHS) would pay 25% in net prices more for innovative medicines, as a way to signal ex-US countries to spend more on medical innovations, but added that an agreement with one country is insufficient to equalise prices.
While scientific technologies like Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) therapies to treat sickle cell anaemia are moving the field forward, Barker said the science may be advancing “far more rapidly than the ability of the government to address changes in science”. Policy changes that foster domestic innovation are necessary, and several speakers at this discussion noted the looming threat of research emerging from China.
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By GlobalDataA strategic plan is needed that considers regulatory plans, policy changes, and manufacturing are needed for the US, said Fritz Bittenbender, Board Chair at BIO and senior vice president at Genentech. “It can’t be just no to China. It has to be: we have to compete and win against China in terms of innovation,” he added.
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