Med-tech M&A activity reached $10.35 billion in the first two months of 2025, with $4.81 billion in deals recorded in January and increasing to $5.55 billion in February. While total M&A value remained strong, the number of M&As dropped month-over-month, falling from 40 transactions in January to 19 in February, but still tracking with the 2024 average of nearly 30 per month.
On March 1, 2025, former NIH director Francis Collins’ announced that he had fully resigned from the NIH, where he continued to lead a laboratory after his resignation as director. Collins gave no reason for his resignation, but it comes just before this week’s confirmation hearings for Jay Bhattacharya, who is U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH and who Collins called a “fringe epidemiologist” during the COVID pandemic. It is a bitter irony that when Collins resigned as NIH director in 2021, then-President Joe Biden said that “countless researchers will aspire to follow in his footsteps.”
Despite the number of med-tech deals increasing to 1,902 in 2024, up 12% from 1,701 in 2023, the value of these deals has dramatically declined compared to previous years.
The former head of the U.S. NIH has sounded a warning that the uncertainty caused by the Trump Administration’s funding cuts and layoffs is blocking “critical work” and “paralyzing” biomedical research. “Every time we launch a new program, every time we continue to commit resources to ongoing work, those are important decisions that we make every single day, and in times like this, that decision-making is paralyzed,” said Monica Bertagnolli, who stood down as director of the NIH on Jan. 17.
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