JPM26 Recap: AI Takes Center Stage While Pharma Waits and Policy Signals Blur

Billion-dollar acquisitions usually dominate the headlines coming out of the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. This year, they mostly didn’t.

Instead, the 44th annual gathering in San Francisco highlighted a shifting balance of power across biopharma. Artificial intelligence partnerships moved from experimental to central, with multiple large drugmakers committing real capital and infrastructure. At the same time, big pharma largely held back on traditional M&A, despite having plenty of dry powder. Layered on top of that was a policy environment that felt anything but steady, as regulators sent mixed signals on approvals, funding, and oversight.

Here are more details from the major takeaways that defined this JPM26.

AI Moves to the Center of Drug Development

Eli Lilly and Nvidia kicked off the week with a $1 billion, five-year partnership announcement that will see the companies build a co-innovation lab in South San Francisco focused on AI-driven drug discovery. The companies said the lab will combine Lilly's R&D capabilities with Nvidia's computing hardware and cloud platforms.

"By combining the latest advances in generative AI, robotics and high-performance computing with Lilly's deep drug discovery expertise, we can potentially accelerate drug discovery timelines by years," David Ricks, Lilly's chairman and CEO, said in a news release.

While the Lilly-Nvidia collaboration was the largest among AI deals, it capped off a growing number of partnerships announced after New Year’s Day. In the first two weeks of January, Servier announced two major AI partnerships: an $888 million collaboration with Insilico Medicine and a deal with Iktos valued at more than €1 billion ($1.2 billion); GSK paid $50 million upfront to license AI models from Noetik for cancer research; and AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sanofi also announced separate partnerships with AI companies.

Deals Continue, but Blockbusters Are Absent

The largest traditional deal announced during the conference was AbbVie's licensing agreement with China-based RemeGen for an experimental cancer therapy for an upfront payment of $650 million and a potential value of $4.95 billion. Despite the size of the transaction, it pales next to deals announced at prior years, such as Johnson & Johnson’s $14.6 billion acquisition of Intra-Cellular Therapies last year. More broadly, a lack of billion-dollar deals was a theme among attendees.

Still, an EY report published ahead of the conference estimated that large pharma companies have roughly $2.1 trillion in available capital for deals and anticipates acquisitions and mergers will play an important role in the industry’s growth in 2026

Regulatory Signals Create Uncertainty

A final theme was the contrast between the FDA’s public messaging about streamlining engagement with the agency and its recent decisions to delay approval of some previously fast-tracked therapies while requesting additional data or modifications.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would cut $2 billion in mental health and addiction grants, only to reverse the decision two days later after bipartisan pushback in Congress. That kind of disruptive policy change was common for the Trump administration’s first year in office, and seems poised to continue.

All of these trends—AI adoption, acquisitions and regulatory changes—shouldn’t slow down the pace of activity in biopharma, EY wrote in their 2026 Firepower report.

“Despite headwinds—including regulatory and geopolitical uncertainty, high valuations, and capital-allocation tradeoffs—we anticipate a strong 2026,” the report said.