Pharmas will need to provide their latest stance on the Most Favored Nation drug pricing plans, while biotech finally gets a break after a few tough years.
Heading into the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference for the past few years, industry watchers have tried to will deals into existence with effusive optimism despite a strained environment. But this time around, all lights are green—and the sun is expected to be shining.
“If last year was overshadowed by uncertainty and trepidation, 2026 seems to be that of optimism and M&A,” BMO Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note ahead of the conference.
A flurry of year-end deals—plus a buzzy bidding war for Metsera—has helped galvanize momentum, while interest rates have fallen and S&P’s biotech index, the XBI, has risen.
This week in the lead up to JPM, which often serves as prime time for a pharma to drop a headline-stealing M&A deal, the story instead was about a spate of biotech fundraisings. On Thursday, a handful of startups announced around $802 million in fundraisings, from series A all the way to a series F.
Executives and other insiders will begin touching down in San Francisco over the weekend for the industry’s annual get-together. Monday morning, the conference officially kicks off, with the CEOs of Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Gilead expected to present at The Westin St. Francis in Union Square.
Deals will be the hottest topic of all—as usual—but this year, experts expect geopolitical and policy drama to see into the discussions more than ever, reflecting a dramatic past year of drug pricing regulation, FDA chaos and more.
Policy Creep
Despite the signing of a number of agreements with the White House this fall, pharma has still not shut the door on the drug pricing debate. At JPM, pharmas will need to provide their latest stance on the Most Favored Nation drug pricing plans, an issue that, along with tariffs and other political news, defined 2025, according to Greg Graves, senior partner for McKinsey’s U.S. life sciences practice.
“I think that there will be a policy element to a lot of what you hear about at JPM,” Graves told BioSpace. “The biopharma world is adapting to an environment with a lot more policy and geopolitical uncertainty than we’ve had in the past. We have new sources of uncertainty that we’re having to absorb beyond the traditional commercial potential, technical risk, regulatory risks, that sort of thing.”
The FDA has also been a concern for all of biopharma, with abrupt regulatory changes, reversals in sentiment on key decisions, unprecedented leadership turnover and major staffing cuts.
“Investors are never enthusiastic about adding more uncertainty to a very uncertain situation,” said Actuate Therapeutics CEO Dan Schmitt, who will be representing the oncology-focused biotech.
Actuate will be having key meetings with the FDA in the first half of this year to gain clarity on moving pancreatic cancer therapy elraglusib, which targets GSK-3β, into Phase III. Schmitt feels the eyes on his company as they go through that process, after last year saw unexpected reversals for Capricor Therapeutics and uniQure.
His goal at JPM will be to speak to potential partners for elraglusib and set up relationships that could come in handy once that regulatory clarity is achieved.
Another issue pharma will need to address, according to Graves and BMO’s analysts, is the looming loss of exclusivity on patents—a perennial problem and a major driver behind the very deals that flow from the JPM conference.
Hoping for Sun
Biotechs, as always, will be speed dating in an attempt to notch critical partnerships to support their pipelines. Coya Therapeutics CEO Arun Swaminathan will be looking to do just that, though he is in the unique position of not having to actively fundraise this time around, he said.
“That makes JPM already more pleasurable,” Swaminathan told BioSpace with a laugh. “We’ll spend a disproportionate amount of time at JPM this time talking to potential strategic partners—to pharma companies.”
Schmitt is just hoping for good weather: “I hope it doesn’t rain,” he joked. The 2025 edition of the conference was sunnier than normal—in terms of both weather and mood.
“I’ve been going to San Francisco for 20 years now . . . and last year, the sun was shining, the city was a little bit less dour,” Schmitt said. “The mood was a little bit better than the previous year, where every CEO was rain soaked and looking for a window to jump out of.”
The advanced weather forecast was indeed looking positive—and so too is the outlook for biotech in general.
“I keep on reflecting with friends about, do you remember 2023 back at J.P. Morgan?” Schmitt said. “The whole mood was very somber.” The biotech indexes were down, fundraising was frozen, everybody was searching for any sign of good news and it was, like usual, “raining cats and dogs.” But things have taken a turn for the better through 2025.
“This year, we sort of have come out of the malaise a little bit,” Schmitt said. “We live in a cyclical industry. And the hope is that this trend of a new spring is going to continue into ’26.”
He added that biotechs have been buoyed by recent deals and pharmas simply have to do more to patch up expected patent losses over the next few years.
“There’s estimates of somewhere between a quarter and a half a trillion dollars worth of patent cliff that they’re facing over the next few years,” Schmitt noted. “I think that’s all working in the favor of small pharma and biotechs and investors.”
