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, 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
