The life sciences world is once again converging in San Francisco as the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference kicks off for 2026.
Meanwhile, several biotechs are already buzzing from a flurry of pre-JPM transactions, which saw the likes of Eli Lilly, GSK, Roche and other Big Pharma companies float some serious cash last week.
Fierce Biotech is here tracking the biggest deals, data drops and industry shifts as they happen. Be sure to check back regularly and throughout this week for the latest updates.
Monday, 6:55 p.m. ET
As the day continued—still without the hallmark frenzy of deals JPM is known for—Sofinnova executive partner Maha Radhakrishnan, M.D., said this week's conference was still “work as usual.”
“In fact, it's much busier than usual, really,” Radhakrishnan told Fierce, citing the "number of companies that are coming our way in terms of good science, good teams and opportunities to invest.”
“This morning's news—it doesn't phase me... JPM has just started,” she continued. “There's still time for announcements to come through. This is not the only time it could happen... I'm hopeful that there will be some M&A announcements coming through.”
Monday, 6:45 p.m. ET
Mid-morning, after being asked by Fierce about the lack of eye-popping buyouts that conference attendees have grown to expect on the first day of the event, Takeda's R&D head Andy Plump, M.D., Ph.D., said the first thing he did when he woke up was look to see what big breaking news had occurred. While the R&D leader was surprised not to see anything, he told Fierce that it made sense “holistically,” citing the industry's consistent deal-making over the last several months.
Monday, 5:52 p.m. ET
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference Monday, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan highlighted 12 potentially registrational readouts from the company expected in 2026 and 2027. None of them were in oncology.
Still, responding to a question from Fierce, Narasimhan assured the audience that Novartis is not taking a break from cancer.
“Often you have in therapeutic areas, these things come in waves,” Narasimhan said.
The present lack of late-stage oncology assets at Novartis comes in the wake of three key phase 3 cancer drugs readouts in the past two years—the ASC4first study for Scemblix in first-line chronic myeloid leukemia, Pluvicto’s PSMAfore trial in chemo-naïve prostate cancer and the Natalee trial for Kisqali in adjuvant breast cancer. As Narasimhan noted, the three drugs could reach combined peak sales of $20 billion across indications.
“I think we're in a period now where we need to reload,” Narasimhan said. “And I think some of the key things we'll have towards the end of the decade are readouts on a lot of the [radioligand therapies], on the small molecule oncology pipeline, and […] the bispecific portfolio.”
Novartis’ late-stage oncology pipeline recently suffered a setback, as well. Pelabresib, the BET inhibitor at the center of Novartis’ $2.9 billion acquisition of MorphoSys, apparently failed to impress the FDA with myelofibrosis data from its phase 3 Manifest-2 trial. The Swiss pharma had previously delayed a regulatory filing after observing some cases of malignant transformation of patients’ disease into acute myeloid leukemia.
Now, Novartis has reached a recent agreement with the FDA to launch another phase 3, registration-enabling trial this year focused on patients with higher symptom burden at baseline, Narasimhan said at JPM. Meanwhile, in the European Union, Novartis plans to file pelabresib for approval this year.
Monday, 4:38 p.m. ET
The first day of JPM 2026 was light on big news, but Biogen research chief Jane Grogan, Ph.D., doesn’t think the lull will last.
“I think there'll probably be some bigger announcements this week, as the days go on,” Grogan told Fierce in San Francisco. “I think there's a lot of consolidation around great science, great ideas in a few areas, some of those we're hoping to capitalize on.”
Biogen itself woke to some well-timed good news Monday, getting word early in the morning that the European Commission had approved a high-dose version of Spinraza (nusinersen) for spinal muscular atrophy.
But while neurology will always be a key area for Biogen, Grogan is keen to continue tapping into the company’s immunological roots. After joining in 2023 amid a wide-scale reorganization at the pharma, Grogan’s team has now settled in and just welcomed aboard a new West Coast Hub centered on the immunology know-how of the recently acquired HI-Bio.
Grogan joined Biogen to “really build out our immunology presence and opportunities for patients,” she said. “The only way we can really build our pipeline is to use the talent, use the skills, use the knowledge we have, and then partner strategically with people that have got great targets, great modalities, a pipeline that we can tap into as well.”
Her ideal transactions aim big, with the goal of securing potential “pipeline-in-a-product” assets. An example is felzartamab, the antibody that originally attracted Biogen to HI-Bio, and which is now being pursued in three different phase 3 trials. Other model pacts from Biogen's recent past include the licensing of Vanqua Bio’s preclinical C5aR1 antagonist, which opens the door to neutrophilic diseases, and a research pact with newly unveiled Dayra Therapeutics to develop macrocyclic peptides.
Monday, 11:10 a.m. ET
Eli Lilly and Nvidia, which count their market caps in the trillions, are putting some of their spending power behind an expanded artificial intelligence collaboration. In a new arrangement unveiled Monday at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Lilly and Nvidia shared a plan to establish a co-innovation laboratory to wed tech and biology and boost AI-powered drug development. The partners plan to commit $1 billion to the effort, with the lab being based in the Bay Area and expected to start work in the coming months. The expanded partnership comes after the companies last year unveiled a plan to build pharma's "most powerful" supercomputer. Story
Monday, 8 a.m. ET
In a new letter, Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., co-founder of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, writes that recent government actions—such as unevidenced attacks on mRNA technology and childhood vaccines—risk undermining the foundations of science and, ultimately, to American health and innovation.
Science is built on a process of generating hypotheses, testing those hypotheses with well-controlled experiments, and then analyzing and sharing results before starting the cycle all over again. Ideally, Afeyan told Fierce Biotech, policy decisions would then be made based on conclusions drawn from resulting scientific evidence.
“We have plenty of money to deploy to this kind of activity, but the fact that it's being withheld or directed in other ways—not through a scientific process but rather through a political process—is the thing that I think we have to correct,” he said.
Afeyan highlighted measles as an example of the consequences unscientific policymaking can have.
“The resurgence of measles is not the result of, say, a random genetic mutation. It is the result of choices, policy decisions, to turn our backs on decades of science,” he wrote. Story