In the first six months of 2026, acquirers announced 13 qualifying acquisitions of public biopharma targets worth $66.6 billion in upfront consideration. This survey examines that period and the surge within it: what is driving it, how the deals are structured, and what it means for the parties negotiating the next one. Focusing on the…
Contingent value rights have become a defining feature of biopharma M&A, appearing in under 10% of mid-cap public-target deals before 2019 but a quarter to a third of them in every year since 2023. They let a buyer pay less cash at signing while preserving upside for selling stockholders on a binary clinical, regulatory, or…
On August 3, 2026, the California Supreme Court held in Gilead Tenofovir Cases (Aug. 3, 2026, S283862) ___ Cal.5th ___ (slip opn.), that a drug manufacturer owes no duty of care to users of a non-defective drug when deciding whether and when to commercialize an allegedly safer alternative drug. The Court reached that conclusion on…
On February 18, 2026, FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and Vinay Prasad, then-Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, published a landmark policy announcement in the New England Journal of Medicine that a single adequate and well-controlled pivotal trial — supplemented by confirmatory evidence — is now the…
What began as a series of demand letters in July 2025 has evolved into something significantly more consequential. By February 2026, sixteen of the seventeen largest pharmaceutical manufacturers have signed Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) pricing agreements with the Trump administration, which commit them to Medicaid price parity, MFN pricing on new product launches, and participation in TrumpRx.gov…
Welcome to Part 1 of our 2026 Life Sciences Industry Outlook series. We are kicking off the week with a look at life sciences M&A activity in 2025 and what it may signal for 2026. M&A activity in 2025 accelerated sharply, marking one of the busiest years on record. Aggregate deal value and the number…