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Good morning from San Francisco! It’s day three of the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference – the biggest gathering of biotech and pharma execs, investors and analysts in the U.S.
The sun has been shining this week, and so has the sector’s optimism. Several drugmakers, investors and advisors suggest that 2026 is already shaping up to be a good — or at least better — year than the last, with major drug pricing and tariff headwinds largely settled, interest rates falling, and, most importantly, encouraging science emerging from companies big and small.
On the dealmaking front, it’s been relatively quiet this week. No major tie-ups have been announced, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t on the way. Meanwhile, companies are charting their year ahead, highlighting key business and drug pipeline updates.
Here’s a recap of what I’ve heard from my conversations with a few major CEOs.
Novo Nordisk CEO Mike Doustdar told me in a Monday interview that the company’s brand-new oral GLP-1 for obesity, the Wegovy pill, and its injectable counterpart under the same name will allow it to expand the incretin market in 2026.
But he said this year “will be the year of price pressure” following a drug pricing deal Novo Nordisk struck with President Donald Trump in November, along with the introduction of cheaper generic versions of some of the company’s drugs in certain international markets.
“When the price goes down, you feel the impact of it immediately,” Doustdar said. But he added that the company seeks to build volume growth to offset those price cuts, which “will not be overnight.”
Doustdar added that on top of progressing its own pipeline, Novo Nordisk will be active on the business development side to “see if anyone else out there has something that can complement our own pipeline.” Those comments come after Novo Nordisk lost a heated bidding war with Pfizer last year over the obesity biotech Metsera.
Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner told me in a Tuesday interview that the company has the potential to deliver up to 10 new products by the end of the decade. Those comments come as Bristol Myers Squibb prepares to offset losses from an upcoming loss of exclusivity cycle of blockbuster drugs over the next several years, which will allow generic competitors to come to the market.
“We’ve intentionally built this portfolio to be quite diverse and so while we know not everything is going to work, we feel really good about the substrate we have in late-stage development, and the mid-stage pipeline is also progressing nicely,” he said.
Boerner highlighted 11 late-stage program readouts in 2026 across six potential new products. That includes the upcoming Alzheimer’s psychosis trials — called the Adept program – for Cobenfy, the company’s prescription medication approved in late 2024 for treating adults with schizophrenia.
When it comes to business development, Boerner said the company is “casting a wide net.” He added that Bristol Myers Squibb is hoping to build on the core therapeutic areas it knows well, look across different phases of development and focus on “the best, most innovative science that we can find” to tackle difficult-to-treat diseases.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the company is “all in on obesity” following its roughly $10 billion acquisition of the obesity biotech Metsera last year. Speaking to a group of reporters on Monday, Bourla said the company plans to launch 10 different late-stage studies of obesity products from Metsera by the end of the year, including one study it started in November.
He also said there were a few things Pfizer didn’t take into account when negotiating that Metsera deal, including the large out-of-pocket market for obesity drugs, where patients are willing to pay for treatments with cash. Bourla likened the opportunity to Pfizer’s experience with Viagra, which the company launched in 1998.
“Both Lilly and Novo presented their sales and had significant sales outside the reimbursement system. Basically, outside the U.S., we were calculating very limited sales,” Bourla said. “Now we see that this operates almost like Viagra, where people were willing to pay and buy it, although it was not reimbursed at all.”
And here’s some of the other pharma news that came up during the conference:
- Eli Lilly and Nvidia on Monday announced that the two companies would jointly invest up to $1 billion over five years to create a lab in San Francisco focused on using AI to accelerate drug discovery.
- AbbVie on Monday struck a deal with the Trump administration to lower some of its drug prices and invest $100 billion domestically over the next decade in exchange for an exemption from tariffs and “future pricing mandates.” The company is now among more than a dozen large drugmakers that struck similar agreements with Trump as part of his “most favored nation” policy.
- AbbVie also said Monday it has agreed to pay $650 million upfront to license an experimental cancer therapy from China’s RemeGen, in a deal that could eventually be worth nearly $5.6 billion.
Feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Annika at a new email: annika.constantino@versantmedia.com.