U.S. FDA drug approvals totaled 19 in March 2026, matching February and showing a solid level of regulatory activity, though slightly below the 22 approvals recorded in March 2025 and under the spike of 30 seen in March 2024.
The quest by psychedelic drugs for full legitimacy in the pharmaceutical world has seen marked progress as well as (fewer) setbacks of late, and developers are hopeful that an important corner has been turned.
Total med-tech financings reached $8.81 billion in the first quarter (Q1) 2026, a 6% decline from $9.33 billion in Q1 2025 but well above the post-downturn lows of recent years. The 2026 total exceeds $6.45 billion in Q1 2024 and $4.69 billion in Q1 2023, indicating continued recovery from the weaker funding environment that followed the 2021 peak. While still below the $16.59 billion recorded in Q1 2019 and the pandemic-era highs, the data suggest that financing activity has stabilized at a higher baseline, with 2026 maintaining momentum despite a slight year-over-year pullback.
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.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s buyout of Ventyx Biosciences Inc. for $1.2 billion at the start of the year brought to the forefront NLR family pyrin domain containing 3 (NLRP3) inhibitors, on which a handful of developers have been working – and research in the space continues to roll out, as with the paper published March 26 in Nature that delved into mechanisms that rev up the NLRP3 inflammasome.
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.
In what shakes out to be the largest follow-on stock offering in biopharma history, Revolution Medicines Inc., an oncology company that was the subject of buyout rumors earlier this year, priced 10.56 million shares to raise $1.5 billion just two days after wowing investors with top-line phase III data of its RAS inhibitor daraxonrasib in patients with metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.