Top 20 life sciences deals show where 2025 money moved
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PharmaShots’ new “Top 20 Life Sciences Deals of 2025,” produced with DealForma data, offers a useful year-end read on where the market put its biggest bets last year: obesity, oncology, enabling platforms, and life sciences infrastructure. The list is less about a single headline transaction than about a pattern, with high-value licensing deals and strategic collaborations standing alongside a smaller number of major acquisitions and divestitures. (linkedin.com)
That pattern fits the broader market backdrop. DealForma’s 2025 review found global healthcare and life sciences M&A climbed to 585 transactions worth $269.3 billion including contingencies, nearly doubling 2024’s announced value. Deloitte similarly reported that by the end of November 2025, life sciences M&A had reached $220 billion across 193 transactions, after a sluggish start gave way to a stronger second half. In both analyses, pharma accounted for a large share of value, and buyers showed a clear preference for bigger, more strategic transactions tied to growth, pipeline replacement, and external innovation. (dealforma.com)
Several deals in the PharmaShots ranking help explain those themes. Roche’s March 12, 2025 agreement with Zealand Pharma put up to $5.3 billion behind petrelintide, an amylin analog being developed for overweight and obesity, with $1.65 billion upfront and a plan to co-develop both monotherapy and combination approaches. BioNTech and Bristol Myers Squibb followed on June 2, 2025 with a global collaboration for BNT327, a PD-L1/VEGF-A bispecific antibody, featuring $1.5 billion upfront, $2 billion in non-contingent anniversary payments through 2028, and up to $7.6 billion in milestones. Pfizer also moved in May 2025 to license 3SBio’s PD-1/VEGF bispecific SSGJ-707 outside China, reinforcing the year’s appetite for oncology assets sourced through partnership rather than outright acquisition. (roche.com)
The list also reflects how 2025 dealmaking extended beyond therapeutics. Thermo Fisher agreed in February 2025 to buy Solventum’s purification and filtration business for about $4.1 billion in cash, a move aimed at expanding Thermo Fisher’s bioprocessing footprint while helping Solventum reduce debt and sharpen its focus. PharmaShots’ ranking also points to repeated interest in discovery platforms, including bispecific antibody technologies, blood-brain barrier delivery approaches, and AI-enabled drug development models. That mix suggests buyers weren’t just shopping for late-stage assets; they were also buying tools that could generate multiple future programs. (investors.solventum.com)
Industry observers have framed 2025 as a rebound year, but with a more selective tone than prior booms. Nature, citing DealForma, described the first half of 2025 as marked by a notable run of high-value biopharma deals. Deloitte said dealmakers increasingly favored derisked assets in competitive therapeutic areas, while DealForma’s own review found services and software drove much of the volume, even as biopharma and diagnostics captured most of the value creation. Taken together, that suggests companies were balancing near-term commercial logic with longer-term platform building. (nature.com)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the direct clinical relevance may be limited today, but the strategic relevance is real. Large human-health transactions often shape the financing environment, platform availability, contract manufacturing capacity, and talent competition that eventually affect animal health, veterinary diagnostics, and companion animal therapeutics. A market that rewards obesity drugs, oncology bispecifics, AI-enabled discovery, and bioprocessing infrastructure can indirectly pull capital and scientific attention away from veterinary-specific programs, while also creating opportunities for spillover technologies and partnership models. In other words, this list is a useful indicator of what the wider life sciences ecosystem is choosing to fund, scale, and prioritize. (linkedin.com)
What to watch: In 2026, the key question is whether this rebound proves durable. Watch for continued cross-border licensing, especially involving Chinese biotech; more platform-centered deals in AI and biologics discovery; and whether manufacturing and services assets remain attractive targets alongside pipeline acquisitions. If that continues, veterinary companies and investors may face a market where adjacent human-health innovation is moving faster, getting pricier, and setting the tempo for the broader health innovation economy. (nature.com)