One of the best questions we heard last week at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference was: “Is this conference about wrapping up 2025 or kicking off 2026?”
From where we sat, the answer was clear. JPM 2026 felt like a kickoff.
Yes, biopharma BD teams were still racing the year-end calendar flip, trying to land deals in time for a JPM headline. But the energy in the conference rooms, and just as importantly, in the hallways and late-night conversations, felt different. After a few years of funding resets and macro uncertainty, this JPM felt like the industry is getting back to work.
San Francisco delivered bright skies and a lively Union Square, but the optimism ran deeper than the weather. This JPM didn’t feel like an industry bracing for impact or recalibrating after a downturn. It felt like one getting serious about execution, speed, and building for the next cycle.
From our vantage point, three themes stood out in the hallway and reception conversations (we feel these are always more fun insights than official words from podiums). Together, they help explain why we’re bullish on 2026.
AI Is Here for Pharma, Even If You’re Not Calling It “AI”
We’ve been writing, talking, and investing in the AI-enabled biotech thesis for years, but even we didn’t expect model- and data-first partnerships to be this prominent at JPM. By our count, they even outnumbered traditional single-asset deal conversations.
A few examples captured the tone: GSK–Noetik, Chai–Lilly, Boltz–Pfizer (alongside Boltz’s reported $28M financing), and NVIDIA–Eli Lilly’s $1B “co-invention” lab. What stood out wasn’t just the dollar amounts or the logos, — it was that these deals felt different. They felt, dare we say it, normal. These deals reflected a more mature posture: models as durable infrastructure, data as a strategic asset, and platforms as compounding leverage rather than one-off tools.
The momentum here is real, and it points to new business models for biopharma; ones built around continuously improving systems rather than isolated programs. Of course, now is where the hard work begins. These partnerships only matter if they drive outcomes, and drug development is brutally unforgiving. “Partner” in this context isn’t a press release noun. It’s a verb. The winners will be the teams who can operationalize these collaborations, close the loop from prediction to experiment, and translate speed into medicines that work.
American Biopharma Is Rediscovering Speed
If there was a unifying energy at JPM this year, it was urgency.
The global innovation landscape is more competitive than ever, and American biopharma is responding not with protectionism but with operational excellence. The message we heard repeatedly: We need to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of getting new drugs to patients. Not in response to any single competitor, but because patients deserve better and the science finally allows it.
The “how” varies by company, modality, and risk tolerance, but two approaches came up again and again:
Clinical trial acceleration. Everything is on the table. For some, that means leveraging geographies that can run faster early studies, using regions like Australia or Eastern Europe for speed without sacrificing quality. And for many, it’s a call for a more fundamental rethink of how we design U.S. trials and generate in-human evidence: how we recruit, how we measure endpoints, how we use real-world data, and how we eliminate the dead time that quietly turns years into decades. Our prediction, expect changes in the US trials system, virtually every conversation underscored that complacency unacceptable.
Faster, leaner, more focused teams. The best teams we spoke with are clearly doing more with less. They’re driving sharper prioritization, faster iteration, and better data-driven decision making. Biotech has always been cross-functional and demanding, but the ecosystem of partners (CROs, CDMOs, tool vendors, specialized labs) increasingly allows small teams to punch well above their headcount. And yes, “AI” tools are part of this. What we see teams are already accomplishing with platforms like Claude Code is a genuine “wow” moment.
Put simply: American biopharma is getting serious about speed as a necessity, not just a goal. The rising tide of global innovation is pushing everyone to be better, and that’s exciting.
Obesity Is Everywhere, But the Buzz Is About What’s Next
It’s impossible to ignore obesity in pharma right now. Weight loss is the “can’t miss” franchise of the moment, and the commercial story is being written in real time with day-to-day execution.
There’s still meaningful work ahead. Oral regimens and real-world adherence aren’t solved, winning combinations remain unclear (dual agonists? triple approaches? muscle-sparing strategies?), and distribution models are evolving rapidly. But it’s not quite early innings anymore.
What made JPM fascinating wasn’t the obesity conversations themselves, though; it was the palpable excitement about what comes next. For all the clarity around obesity, the next big modality × indication intersection remains remarkably open.
Will it be in vivo CAR-T? Cell-specific RNA delivery? Better gene editors enabling a new generation of gene therapy? Cellular reprogramming? The crystal ball is hazy, and that’s what makes it interesting.
What is clear: ambition hasn’t abated. If anything, the quality of early-stage company formation feels higher than ever. Pharma veterans and seasoned drug hunters are teaming up with sharp, hungry young teams to take on problems that would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago. Longevity remains top of mind for many, while others are pushing into N=1 personalized cancer therapeutics and highly targeted approaches that trade scale for precision.
If these themes resonate, or you’re seeing different signals on the ground, we’re always interested in comparing notes. JPM is a moment in time, but 2026 is just getting started.
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