Hopes were high Wednesday for a billion-dollar megadeal—the kind the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is known for—but no major announcements ever materialized.
“There were some rumors of M&A, but there's nothing,” Anna Fan, Ph.D., senior partner of public equity at Novo Holdings—Novo Nordisk’s controlling shareholder—told Fierce Wednesday morning.
“I was talking to a banker on Sunday evening, and he was like, ‘Oh, maybe be on the lookout Wednesday morning,’” Fan said. She was, but no significant deals ever transpired.
“These companies don't hold the news for J.P. Morgan anymore,” Fan said, adding that a lot of biopharmas dropped news last week “before the rush” in hopes of capturing people’s attention “before they’re running around from hotel room to hotel room.”
At past conferences, attendees used the data drops, acquisitions and IPOs announced at the event as a predictive indicator for how the upcoming year may pan out. However, Nkarta CEO Paul Hastings said that never should have been the case.
“Let’s not give J.P. Morgan that much credit,” the biotech leader said.
“There are rules to when you disclose data,” Hastings explained. “So, trying to time your deal around J.P. Morgan can be tricky … You can't hold off on announcing something that is material.”
On the sidelines of the conference, one attendee suggested to Fierce that companies may be instead planning on sharing deals at the TD Cowen Health Care Conference in March. Then there’s London’s annual Jefferies healthcare conference in November, which has been gaining traction in recent years, even earning a reputation as the “J.P. Morgan for Europe.”
Novo Holdings’ Fan agreed that the Jefferies event is “gaining momentum.”
“A lot of European investors see that as a way of touching base with everybody, and that either takes the pressure off the obligation to go to J.P. Morgan or they feel like they could be more targeted to catch up with West Coast-based folks at J.P. Morgan because they already caught up with their European peers,” she said.
The absence of eye-catching announcements may also reflect how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped our modes of communication.
“What’s really started to replace these conferences for the kind of face-to-face interaction with investors are the Zoom calls we do with them all year round,” Hastings said.
Having a virtual meeting while both parties are still in the comfort of their own homes is just “so much more natural,” according to the CEO.
“We started doing that during COVID, and it’s held over,” Hastings added.
Another significant shift in the JPM landscape is the departure of almost all major payers, such as Centene, Cigna and Humana, among others. In fact, the only payers present this year were Alignment Healthcare and Clover Health, two small insurance tech companies. None of the for-profit health systems were on site, either.
The payer exodus began after the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO at the end of 2024, prompting a strong police presence at JPM starting in 2025 that continued this year.
The result of this absence of healthcare players is a much bigger focus on biopharma.
While the news cycle feels quieter than what is typically expected of the premier healthcare conference, attendees remain as busy as ever. Beyond formal sessions at the Westin hotel, hundreds of side events, meetups, interviews and parties still unfolded within a few-mile radius in downtown San Francisco.
“It’s busy as always,” Novo Holdings’ Fan said. “There's a lot of meetings, a lot of running around. The weather is nice.”
Blue skies and daily sunshine marked another stark contrast to JPM conferences of recent years. Just two years ago, flooding and severe thunderstorms disrupted the event, followed by intermittent rain and overcast skies for 2025.
In this week's sunshine, artificial-intelligence-focused biopharma ads flashed across electronic billboards in Union Square and could be glimpsed on cars, Uber ads and nearly every other marketable surface in sight. The square has even gained a new addition—the store Popmart, a Chinese toy company known for their blind box Labubu doll.
Several men in suits—presumably conference attendees—were seen on the third day seeking out their own Labubu.
“They put Popmart there,” Fierce Healthcare’s Paige Minemyer said. “I don’t know if it was intentional, but it sure was alluring.”
Indeed, Minemyer was pulled from the conference, stopping in the store to also get in on the action.
And, while this year’s JPM conference may be the first to feature Labubus, it's hardly the first time the industry has paused to reassess what the event truly represents.
Though attendees are still as busy as ever, the question remains: Is JPM evolving away from being the main stage for blockbuster announcements toward something quieter but just as important—a hub for networking, relationship-building and taking the industry’s pulse rather than declaring its future?