Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #68: 2026 Opens Hot With M&As, Mega-Rounds, and Model Deployments
A first read on deal flow, platform launches, and strategic intent emerging as JPM week sets the tone for early 2026
Today, we distill a first pass on what’s already landed across the first half of January, with much of the news breaking over the past week as JPM gets underway.
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First things first, we’re pleased to share that our Board Advisor, Andrii Lozoniuk, is in San Francisco for JPM2026 starting today. Andrii will be on the ground throughout the week tracking deal flow, strategic signals, and early-year sentiment across biotech and pharma, with a short roundup to follow in the newsletter.
If you’re in SF and would like to connect, reach out to Andrii directly or email us at info@biopharmatrend.com to set up a time.
An Endpoints tally put the first full week of January at roughly $2.3B in new private biotech capital, with public follow-ons and an IPO pushing the combined total to about $4.9B heading into JPM. In parallel, 2025 closed with healthcare private equity at a record ~$190B in deal value.
Early 2026 deal flow is already heavy, spanning Servier’s €1B+ AI partnership with Iktos, Lilly’s up to $950M InduPro collaboration and its $1.3B Nimbus obesity pact, plus M&A led by Lilly’s $1.2B Ventyx buy and Amgen’s up to $840M Dark Blue acquisition. The biggest potential headline sits above the confirmed deals. Financial Times reported Merck is in talks to buy Revolution Medicines for up to $32B.
On the big-tech and healthcare side, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, and Anthropic used the JPM week to roll out Claude for Healthcare.
Historical note
JPM’s rush week has deep roots. The event started in 1983 as a small Hambrecht & Quist healthcare investor meeting at the Westin St. Francis with about 20 presenting companies and roughly 200 attendees, initially centered on biotech.
Its scope widened after H&Q was acquired by Chase in 2000 and Chase was acquired by J.P. Morgan in 2001, bringing the conference under the J.P. Morgan umbrella and expanding the mix to pharma, startups, payers, and non-profits.
Over time, JPM has served as a sentiment barometer as well as a deal-stage, including visible inflection points like the early-2000s genomics boom and a more muted 2009 meeting amid the financial crisis. Last year’s conference reflected heightened security concerns, uncertainty around incoming U.S. policy shifts, and increasing attention to Chinese assets.
Early signals
A few sentiments are coming through consistently in conversations at JPM today: companies are openly scanning for assets across stages, “cheap China” is part of the comparison set but not the only axis, and there’s a clear emphasis on deal quality and fit over price alone. That said, day one has been heavier on intent and positioning than on fresh signatures, with more deal talk than deal announcements so far.
Two anchors could help interpret the broader flow of headlines this week and onwards. One is the patent cliff, with nearly $300B in revenue expected to lose exclusivity by the end of the decade, keeping lifecycle management, partnering, and selective M&A high on agendas. The other is the obesity race, where pressure around oral candidates, next-gen GLP-1s, and differentiation continues to shape R&D prioritization and capital deployment.
With that context set, here are the past week’s and today’s developments through our usual, more granular lens.
🤖 AI x Bio
(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)
🔹 Manas AI, launched last January by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Siddhartha Mukherjee with $24.6M, just announced a partnership with Schrödinger to integrate physics-based modeling into its AI platform for discovering small molecules, biologics, and RNA therapies.
🔹 Post-IPO, Insilico Medicine advances AI-designed gut-targeted drug into Phase II for ulcerative colitis, aiming to repair the intestinal barrier with a PHD inhibitor developed using its generative AI platform. Also, Insilico says it nominated a preclinical small-molecule candidate with Hisun just 8 months after launching their AI-driven discovery collaboration.
🔹 Tahoe, Arc Institute, and CZI’s Biohub partner to create largest virtual cell dataset, generating 120M cells and 225k perturbations to fuel open-source AI models simulating drug response and disease biology.
🔹 Owkin partners with NVIDIA to scale AI agents for biology, advancing its reasoning model on patient data and launching Pathology Explorer with Anthropic’s Claude to support drug discovery and diagnostics.
🔹 DrugCLIP debuts as a post-AlphaFold AI model, screening protein-small molecule interactions up to x10 million faster than docking by embedding structures and chemistry in a shared space, with a database of 500M compounds.
🔹 Boston-based Somite AI rebrands as Cellular Intelligence to pursue a universal virtual cell signaling model, scaling its microfluidics platform to over 1M conditions to map how signal sequences guide cell fate.
🔹 1910 releases AI model PEGASUS that generates cell-permeable macrocyclic peptides with high polarity, addressing a key barrier in peptide drug development.
🔹 Dyno Therapeutics unveils Dyno-yp2, an AI-designed AAV capsid showing >94% brain transduction and 80-fold liver detargeting in TfR-humanized mice, advancing CNS gene therapy delivery.
🔹 Following its $130M Series B and unicorn $1.3B valuation, Chai Discovery partners with Eli Lilly to train custom AI for biologics design, integrating its antibody generation platform with Lilly’s proprietary data.
🔹 BigHat Biosciences expands its collaboration with Eli Lilly to develop generalizable AI models for antibody drug discovery, using high-throughput wet lab data to improve early-stage candidate selection.
🔹 Freenome teams up with NVIDIA to scale AI for early cancer detection, using accelerated deep learning to enhance blood-based tests and develop an open-source foundation model for cell-free DNA analysis.
🔹 Lantern Pharma launches AI Center of Excellence in India to scale its RADR drug discovery platform, expand beyond oncology, and industrialize multi-agent AI for global biopharma partners.
🔹 Medable launches AI agent to automate trial master file processing, aiming to cut manual work and speed up clinical trial operations.
🔹 Danish biotech Genmab partners with US-based Anthropic to deploy Claude-powered agentic AI tools to accelerate data analysis and document generation in clinical development.
🔹 AI to guide dual-action cancer therapy — US-based BostonGene partners with Ottimo Pharma to apply multiomic AI models for patient selection and clinical acceleration of a first-in-class PD-1/VEGFR2 immuno-oncology antibody.
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🚜 Market Movers
(News from established pharma and tech giants)
🔹 Bayer partners with Amsterdam-based Cradle in 3-year deal to deploy generative AI for antibody discovery and jointly advance machine learning tools to speed biologics development.
🔹 OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health and ChatGPT Healthcare, consumer and clinical tools built on GPT-5.2 for personalized guidance and hospital use, now live in major U.S. health systems (early access).
🔹 Anthropic follows with Claude for Healthcare, a HIPAA-ready clinical and consumer AI tool unveiled at JPM26, enabling health data integration, admin support, and medical reasoning across U.S. systems. The company also added a ClinicalTrials.gov connector to Claude, enabling structured AI access to over 500k trials for protocol drafting, and more.
🔹 UK’s Basecamp Research, with NVIDIA and Microsoft, launches AI models for precise gene insertion, enabling new gene and cell therapies and designing antimicrobials against drug-resistant bacteria.
🔹 Schrödinger integrates Eli Lilly’s $1B AI platform into LiveDesign, giving drug developers access to molecular design models for small molecules and antibodies starting in Q1 2026.
🔹 Eli Lilly integrates its AI platform with Benchling, giving over 1,300 biotechs access to drug discovery models for small molecules and antibodies via secure federated learning.
🔹 MIT and Microsoft researchers create an AI model to design nanoparticle-bound peptides that signal cancer-linked enzyme activity, enabling low-cost, at-home urine tests for early diagnosis.
💰 Money Flows
(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)
🔹 NVIDIA and Lilly to launch $1B AI drug discovery hub in South San Francisco to co-develop next-gen biology and chemistry models by linking automated labs with AI systems.
🔹 Servier signs €1B+ multi-target AI drug discovery deal with Iktos, tapping its generative design and robotic synthesis platform for small-molecule programs in oncology and neurology.
🔹 Eli Lilly signs up to $950M deal with US-based InduPro to develop AI-guided multispecific cancer therapies using a membrane protein mapping platform to improve tumor targeting and reduce toxicity.
🔹 GSK signs $50M+ deal with Noetik for AI-driven virtual cell models to simulate tumor biology in lung and colorectal cancer.
🔹 After raising over $290M in Hong Kong’s largest biotech IPO of 2025, Insilico Medicine signs up to $888M oncology deal with Servier, combining AI-driven drug discovery with Servier’s clinical development to advance small-molecule cancer therapies.
🔹 Hippocratic AI raises $141M Series B at $1.6B valuation, launching a healthcare agent app store and acquiring Grove AI to expand into life sciences, now partnering with 23 health systems and backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, a16z, and NVIDIA.
🔹 insitro to acquire Israel-based CombinAbleAI to launch TherML, a unified AI platform for designing small molecules, oligos, and biologics.
🔹 US-based Soley Therapeutics raises $200M Series C to advance its AI-powered cell stress sensing platform and move two first-in-class oncology drugs toward clinical trials.
🔹 RNA biotech goes public — China-based Ribo Life Science raises over $230M in a heavily oversubscribed Hong Kong IPO to advance its siRNA pipeline targeting cardiometabolic and renal diseases.
🔹 BioNTech and UPenn launch a $50M seed fund to back early-stage therapeutics, diagnostics, and AI drug discovery startups emerging from Penn research, aiming to boost innovation beyond mRNA.
🔹 Servier launches €200M VC arm — French pharma Servier establishes Servier Ventures to invest in early-stage European biotech startups in oncology and neurology, expanding its dealmaking strategy through minority stakes.
🔹 Targeting all EGFR forms — US-based EpiBiologics, a Genentech spinout, raises $107M Series B to advance its first-in-class protein-degrading antibody for lung and head-and-neck cancers, aiming to overcome mutation-specific resistance with a broader EGFR approach.
🔹 Scaling spatial biology — US-based Vizgen raises $48M to expand global access to its spatial multi-omics platform, accelerate product innovation, and scale manufacturing for single-cell research tools.
🔹 American biotech Locus Biosciences awarded $3.3M from NIH, with up to $28M total, to run a clinical trial of its AI- and synthetic biology-powered bacteriophage therapy for drug-resistant pneumonia in ICU patients.
🔹 Finnish startup Avenue Biosciences raises $5.7M to scale its AI-driven platform for high-throughput protein engineering, aiming to ease manufacturing of complex biologics.
⚙️ Other Tech
(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)
🔹 In Alzheimer’s drug search, Novoron wins $2.5M NIH grant to develop an AI-assisted human brain organoid platform that screens drugs targeting tau spread in more realistic brain models.
🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society
(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)
🔹 AI takes over routine prescribing — Utah pilots AI-only prescription renewals via startup Doctronic, co-led by a UCSF surgeon, marking a US first in automating clinical decisions without physician input for chronic care management.
🔹 FDA issues draft guidance endorsing Bayesian methods in clinical trials, aiming to speed drug development by enabling more flexible designs and efficient use of prior data, especially in rare and pediatric diseases.
🔹 FDA approved 46 new drugs in 2025, with oncology leading (35%) and strong showings in bispecifics, ADCs, and RNA; first-in-class standouts and modest sales forecasts highlight a shift toward focused, mid-scale innovation.
🚀 A New Kid on the Block
(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)
🔹 MIT spinout Boltz launches with $28M and Pfizer deal, aiming to democratize biomolecular AI with open-source models and a hosted discovery platform for drug design and protein engineering.
🔹 CRISPR’s first one-patient success becomes a company as Aurora Therapeutics launches with $16M to scale custom gene editing for rare diseases, founded by Jennifer Doudna and Fyodor Urnov after their therapy for “Baby KJ.”
🔹 Relation partners with Deerfield to launch joint NewCos, advancing AI-discovered therapeutic targets from its lab-in-the-loop platform into drug development through a shared translation model.
🔹 Topos Bio emerges from stealth with Topos-1, an all-atom foundation model for intrinsically disordered proteins, aiming to unlock drug discovery for ~40% of the human proteome missed by tools like AlphaFold.
Read also:
Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape
This is an exceptionally high-signal roundup! Thank you for distilling JPM-week “noise” into directional truth. What jumped out to me is how clearly 2026 is opening with a three-layer stack: capital moving early, platform/M&A consolidation, and model deployments migrating from “R&D demo” to operational workflows. 
The most consequential theme here is translation pressure: it’s no longer enough for AI-in-bio to generate plausible candidates or elegant slides; these systems are being integrated into clinical development, diagnostics, and even care delivery (e.g., healthcare-focused LLM products rolling out alongside the conference buzz). That raises the right next questions: where are the failure modes, how do we validate “reasoning” vs. fluent text, and who is accountable when automation touches real patients? 
I also appreciated the inclusion of the regulatory/standards signals (e.g., FDA’s draft guidance endorsing Bayesian methods). Those “plumbing” shifts are often the real accelerants, because they determine what can be proven and shipped. 
This reads like early evidence that techbio is leaving its adolescence. More money, more deals, more models, now the bar becomes durable clinical value.
Great roundup. From an advanced therapies perspective, I’m watching whether this AI wave starts touching the real bottlenecks — manufacturability, comparability, release strategy, and supply reliability — not just target ID and molecule design. The “AI + automated lab” deals are a step in that direction.
Do you see any of these platforms extending downstream into CMC/bioprocess (or is that still the missing layer)?