Despite key vacancies, ongoing staffing challenges and policy issues at the U.S. CDC, FDA and NIH, some of the regulatory churn that roiled those agencies in the first year of the second Trump administration is settling a bit, at least in terms of the number of executive orders (EOs) coming out of the Oval Office.
Med-tech M&A activity surged in March 2026, with deal value reaching $23.66 billion, the highest monthly total since June 2022’s $36.27 billion and a sharp increase from $17.53 billion in February and $1.69 billion in January.
Total med-tech financings reached $8.54 billion in the first quarter (Q1) of 2026, reflecting a modest pullback from $9.33 billion in the same period of 2025 but remaining well above previous years. The Q1 2026 total exceeds the $6.45 billion recorded in Q1 2024 and $4.69 billion in Q1 2023, signaling continued recovery from the post-2021 downturn.
Don’t like a court order? Sidestep it. That seems to be the idea behind U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy’s latest changes to his renewal of the charter for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
Med-tech deal value, excluding M&As, totaled $628.41 million in the first quarter (Q1) of 2026, an increase of about 322% from the $149.08 million recorded in Q1 2025 though a 36% drop from Q4 2025‘s $978.58 million.
With all the focus of late on the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the FDA’s 30-plus advisory committees have been flying under the radar, especially since many of them haven’t met for a few years now.
At BioEurope Spring 2026, pharma representatives and investors shared their thoughts about current and future landscapes of different disease areas, and on how to move toward success – both at the level of individual companies and for indications as a whole.
There is broad agreement that psychiatric diagnoses in their current form are not reflective of any underlying biology, and that this is one of the things hampering psychiatric drug development. “We are still fully reliant on descriptive diagnoses that yield heterogeneous patient cohorts,” Steve Hyman told the audience at the European Congress of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Roadmap Meeting on Precision Psychiatry in Amsterdam in January.
U.S. med-tech companies are optimistic about the year ahead and believe that they are well positioned to navigate geopolitical headwinds and the uncertainty that they bring. Their technologies, which span neurosurgery and tissue reconstruction to cardiology and radiation protection, address important clinical needs. With the major U.S. corporates accelerating dealmaking and acquisitions, these companies see strong momentum building for the year ahead.
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