The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference started off with a flurry of deals that reinvigorated excitement across the biopharma industry. Johnson & Johnson moved to acquire Intra-Cellular Therapies for $14.6 billion, breaking a dealmaking barrier that kept Big Pharma’s 2024 biotech buyouts to under $5 billion.
While J&J stole the headlines, GSK got there first at JPM this year with a $1 billion upfront offer to buy precision therapy specialist IDRx and its rare cancer drug candidate. Eli Lilly also threw down a cool $1 billion for Scorpion Therapeutics’ PI3Kα inhibitor program.
Biogen also made an unsolicited bid for embattled partner Sage Therapeutics, valuing the neuroscience biotech at $469 million, which got more complicated days later when Sage sued. This week, Sage rejected the unsolicited offer, setting up a deal–no deal battle to watch this year.
All in all, the transactions helped bring a little shine back to biopharma at the meeting, which typically sets the tone for the year. I was on the ground in San Francisco, reporting for BioSpace on what biopharma executives were plotting for this year. My conversations with Biogen, Daiichi Sankyo, BioNTech, Gilead and Novavax were among the highlights.
JPM is, of course, also the time for the industry to make its predictions for the year. Executives I spoke to foresaw the return of M&A in a big way this year. Mark McKenna, CEO of Mirador Therapeutics, even boldly claimed that 2025 will be the year of the megamerger, with biopharma returning to the heyday of 2019 when $60 billion-plus deals were not uncommon.
BioSpace also makes some predictions of its own, each January releasing its picks for biotech startups to watch. This year we’re featuring 25 companies that run the gamut of biopharma innovation, from ADCs to radiopharmaceuticals to cell and gene therapy and more. At JPM, we got the chance to meet several of our star companies to hear what is driving them in this challenging time for the industry.
As just one example, neuropsychiatry-focused Seaport Therapeutics is looking to perpetuate the momentum started last year with the approval of BMS’ schizophrenia drug Cobenfy. That drug came from the nearly $9 billion acquisition of Karuna, whose former execs now work together at Seaport.
We’ll have more to come from our NextGen Class of 2025 in the coming weeks. At JPM I spoke with the CEOs of Cour Pharmaceuticals, Delphia Therapeutics, Ratio Therapeutics and Mirador. Stay tuned for more content from the BioSpace team.
Editor‘s note: This article was originally published as a Special Edition of Biopharm Executive, BioSpace‘s weekly newsletter covering business and financial news. You can subscribe here.
