The following is an excerpt from Jon Chesto and Shirley Leung’s Power Play newsletter on July 23, 2026:
Now, head up to the 40th floor at 53 State St. Drop in on Jeff Leerink and his merry band of health care investment bankers. Leerink Partners just handled its first pair of $10 billion transactions, representing Crinetics in its sale to Boston’s Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and GSK in its purchase of Cambridge-based Nuvalent.
Everyone is bustling and hustling. Consider these numbers from Leerink’s database. At least $85 billion worth of deals with upfront values of $1 billion or more were announced globally in the first half of 2026 (and that doesn’t include Crinetics, on July 6). This year’s total is on track to exceed last year’s by 63 percent, far more than any of the past six years.
“This is as active a biotech M&A market as I’ve ever seen in my 33 years of doing this,” says Tom Davidson, Leerink’s co-president. “This is as motivated and as broad a universe of potential buyers as I’ve ever seen.”
There was uncertainty in the early days of the current Trump administration over federal research funds, drug price crackdowns, tariffs, and FDA drama. “None of it really played out in a really bad way” for the industry, says David Kellman, an investment banker with Citizens Financial Group. “Everyone’s in a much better mood.”
Well, maybe not everyone. Finding investors remains tough for many newer biotech startups. Buyers want more of a sure thing nowadays. MassBio’s Ben Bradford says the average size of “seed rounds,” the first injection of VC funds, has shrunk in half from $11 million in 2022 to under $5 million this year. “The feedback from founders,” he says, “is it’s hard to get money.”
While M&A activity is a leading indicator for biotech, real estate is a lagging one. Many firms don’t need much space. (Nuvalent, for example, uses CIC’s coworking space in Kendall Square.) Bradford believes the area’s lab vacancy rate, still around 30 percent, was inflated because so many real estate investors and developers jumped in at the same time. Office-lab conversions, in particular, will take a while to fill.
