Inside The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Extravaganza

In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at upcoming M&A activity, a ‘holy grail’ pill for sleep apnea, Pomelo Care’s expansion, Nvidia and Lilly’s $1 billion AI venture, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

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This week kicked off the healthcare industry’s yearly extravaganza: The 44th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, which is typically a hotbed of dealmaking activity.

This year, the M&A talk ahead of the San Francisco event was relatively muted. Lilly agreed last week to buy Ventyx, which is working on a drug to treat recurrent pericarditis, for $1.2 billion. But while there were no megadeal announcements, the potential for one lurked in the background. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Merck was in talks to buy cancer drug developer Revolution Medicines for up to $32 billion. Shares are up 52% over the past month.

Whether a deal for RevMed ultimately happens, it seems likely that dealmaking will continue in 2026. Biopharma M&A activity reached $116 billion in 2025, more than double the $52 billion of 2024, according to a recent research report by J.P. Morgan based on data from DealForma.

Tailwinds abound for this year. As EY noted in its recent annual M&A Firepower report, “deals and alliances will remain central to life sciences growth strategies” for several reasons. For one, Big Pharma faces a coming “patent cliff” for numerous blockbuster drugs, including Keytruda (Merck’s cancer treatment) and Eliquis (Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer’s blood thinner). For another, the battle for a share of the obesity drug market, which is expected to reach $100 billion in sales, shows no signs of slowing down. Finally, continued development of novel therapies in China means that established companies and startups alike will be jockeying to gain access to them.

A ‘Holy Grail’ Sleep Apnea Pill Could Be On The Market Next Year

Apnimed CEO Larry Miller

Albie Colantonio for Forbes

In November 2016, Harvard researcher Dr. Luigi Taranto Montemurro was in a lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital observing the sleep of a middle-aged man with obstructive sleep apnea, who lay in a bed attached to wires to track whether he stopped breathing overnight. Taranto Montemurro was testing a potential medication, but he didn’t expect much. Researchers had been trying for decades to come up with a drug that could fix the common condition—in which breathing pauses during sleep, sometimes lowering oxygen levels to a dangerous degree—and every earlier effort had failed.

Then he realized that the sleeping man was breathing normally.

“Usually this guy was full of apneas and suddenly he was breathing well. So I went to see if something was off on the equipment that it was not connected properly,” Taranto Montemurro told Forbes. But the hookup was fine. The combination of two existing drugs he’d been testing had worked. “It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe my eyes,’” he said.

Fast forward nine years later, and Cambridge, Mass.-based startup Apnimed, which acquired the rights to the potential medication from Harvard, is preparing to file for FDA approval for a nightly pill based on those two drugs for the breathing disorder. In very simplified terms, the medication works by waking up the brain stem, preventing full muscle relaxation in the throat, while allowing the brain itself to rest during sleep. If all goes well, it could be on the market in the first half of 2027, offering a potentially life-changing treatment for some of the estimated 80 million people in the U.S. with sleep apnea.

Inside The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Extravaganza

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