On The Road: The Business Of Biotech In San Francisco For JPM2026
By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Each January, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference helps to set the biopharmaceutical industry agenda for the coming year, and more suits can be seen on the streets of San Francisco than during any other week of the year. There were fewer ties in 2026 — a multiyear decline — but still plenty of suits.
The Business of Biotech attended a handful of company presentations at the conference, as well as special events in surrounding hotels and other venues, and recorded new in-person episodes on the outskirts of the Weston St. Francis. The mood at the conference this year mirrored the weather: sunny, with an occasional chill, an improvement over last year’s rain and gloom. Even news of the death of Grateful Dead guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Bob Weir — a legendary figure in San Francisco — on the Saturday before the conference started didn’t bring down the vibe.
Conference coverage is abundant, but here are a few selected highlights and happenings from this year’s gathering.
HIV Voluntary Licensing And Unknown Volume In Obesity
The specter of compulsory licensing still haunts industry balance sheets, even if its capacity to frighten seems muted in recent years — despite an uptick in wealthier countries deploying this tactic, according to a recent study published in BMJ Global Health.
Even so, it’s notable that Gilead Sciences — “the first company ever to do a voluntary license to a medicine,” according to Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day — is providing access to lenacapavir for HIV treatment and prevention in low and lower-middle income countries through non-exclusive, royalty-free agreements with six generics manufacturers, and through direct provisioning in some countries where generic manufacturing is not yet available.
During a media breakfast in San Francisco, O’Day noted that now, 20 years after that first voluntary license of tenofovir, Gilead worked to build access to Yeztugo, the long-acting, twice-per-year injected version of lenacapavir, even before it was approved by the FDA last June. “We actually had identified six generic manufacturers within months of the [Yeztugo] Phase 3 data reading out, and technology transferred that also within months, which has never been done before,” said O’Day. “It normally takes years.” A commendable effort, although the company could do more to broaden access for middle income countries in North Africa and Latin America, according to Medicines Sans Frontieres.
The Grand Ballroom at the St. Francis overflowed substantially into the lobby as conference attendees attempted to squeeze their way into Eli Lilly’s company presentation, where Lilly CEO David Ricks talked up the company’s “co-innovation lab” partnership with NVIDIA, and the pending approval of orforglipron, an oral GLP-1 discovered by Japan-based Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. and licensed by Lilly in 2018.
Orforglipron, which was selected for the FDA Commissioner’s National Priority Review Voucher pilot program last November, is expected to receive FDA approval during the second quarter, per Ricks. Medicare Part D coverage — with a $50 out-of-pocket cost — is expected to kick in right around the time of launch, he said, and “hopefully that spills over to commercial insurance.” Part D coverage represents a “step change” for access, going from zero patients to millions in Medicare, said Ricks, adding that volume amounts via government plan coverage is “an open question at this point.”
Ricks also suggested that orforglipron would be useful as a maintenance dose after obesity patients’ weight loss plateaus at 18 to 24 months, and that orforglipron, as an oral formulation, would be easier to deliver in markets like Brazil, due to simpler handling and refrigeration requirements. There are simply no analogies for a chronic treatment with acute benefits, such as joint pain relief, better sleep, and better movement, he said. Updated financial guidance will be delivered on February 4, 2026, during Lilly’s 4Q 2025 earnings call.
TechBio At The San Francisco Mint
Is it too on the nose to hold swanky biopharma industry events at a venue that once literally minted money? Evidently not, given the number of such events I’ve attended at The Mint over the years during JPM. I’m not complaining; this year’s TechBio Talk Live event, hosted by Recursion Pharmaceuticals, was a star-studded affair, featuring journalist and founder of Stand Up to Cancer Katie Couric in conversation with Recursion’s new CEO, Najat Khan, Ph.D., as well as a Couric-moderated panel including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman; cardiologist, scientist, and author Eric Topol, M.D.; Jazz Pharmaceuticals CEO Renee Gala; and Groupon cofounder Eric Lefkofsky.
Khan noted that AI is opening new doors, such as “allowing us to look at the 80% of biology that is not well known today.” She described Recursion’s current drug development projects and partnerships, its acquisition and integration with Exscientia (led by Recursion cofounder, chairman, and former CEO Chris Gibson, a past Business of Biotech guest), and the three key areas AI will help improve in the future: early diagnosis and prediction; shrinking timelines for new medicines; and providing care to an ageing population.
On the panel, Gala said that every single Jazz Pharmaceuticals employee will be trained on AI at a foundational level by the end of 2026, in addition to other company groups that are more advanced. Jazz also built an internal tool to better understand the probability of a patient abandoning a therapy, and the reasons why, to help improve the kind of support the company provides to patients, said Gala. “The more we can develop tools to understand what patients need, the better off we will be at addressing them,” she said. Gala also cited Jazz’s research collaboration with Iambic Therapeutics as a potential accelerator for drug discovery and development.
Asked what worries him most about AI in medicine, Topol mentioned privacy and security concerns, but said his biggest worry is a lack of “compelling data.” To really change the medical community, said Topol, more data is needed for AI training, like randomized trial data and prospective cohorts. Drug development companies tend to keep their data locked up, noted Topol, but ultimately AI will be a net benefit to the practice of medicine. “I think the hallucination/confabulation story will be a net benefit … even though AI may make some mistakes along the way, it’s probably got a better chance of bringing that net mistake rate way down from what it is today,” i.e., the human net mistake rate. AI accuracy is improving with medical images, said Topol, and interpreting diagnostic images, particularly in mammography and colonoscopy, has improved significantly. Topol also pointed to the recent launches of ChatGPT Health, Claude Health, and a Doctronic program in Utah that patients can use for AI medication refills, sans human physician.
Hoffman talked about his recent cofounding of an AI drug discovery and development company — Manas AI — with Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., D.Phil, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The company entered a strategic agreement with Schrödinger, Inc, which “brings in physics and chemistry knowledge” to help train the company’s model. Hoffman said Manis AI is targeting a “massive acceleration factor,” and is already seeing “some pretty interesting, early promising signals.”
For patients and physicians, if you’re not using a frontier AI model on your phone as a second opinion about any serious health issue, you’re making a mistake, said Hoffman. AI will become proactive and conversational about consumer health; it might suggest, for example, that “’you might have something serious, maybe you want to consider going to the emergency room or a medical clinical,’ and then, ‘do you mind if I share a summary of the conversation we [AI and consumer] just had with the physician, with the nurse, to say, these are the questions I asked?’” said Hoffman. “’These are the answers I got, here’s what I think is possibly going on.’ Think about the acceleration of the aid that enables.”
“I think we’re going to see a pivot to prevention and prediction,” said Topol. “We’ve never done this in medicine. Everything is reactive: treat, treat, treat.”
Business Of Biotech: JPM Episodes Now Available
Despite the sometimes rushed and harried atmosphere JPM creates each year, I’m pleased with the recorded conversations presented in new episodes of the Business of Biotech, now available on your choice of podcast providers, or in video form here. Topics covered include lead candidate indication selection and funding pivotal trials across continents; the importance of early investment in CMC, and transitioning from research to development, and development to commercialization; and new opportunities in obesity, deal strategy, and AI for commercialization, among others yet to come.
To the Business of Biotech’s listeners and watchers, thank you as always, and please don’t hesitate to send your feedback, criticisms, and Business of Biotech guest recommendations to ben.comer@lifescienceconnect.com. To the friends and colleagues I only get to see once a year in San Francisco during JPM, see you next year!