A changing playing field: Observations of the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference from a European perspective

The answer, it turns out, depends on where you’re standing and increasingly, on how you position yourself between three competing poles of innovation.

A more level field?

“My impression is things are a little bit more quiet this year than in the past years,” observed Enno Spillner, CFO of Formycon, speaking to me in the company’s suite at the Beacon Grand hotel, one of the city’s many pop-up office locations renting space for the week. The reduced foot traffic wasn’t necessarily bad news, he said. It suggested a market maturing beyond spectacle into substance.

More significantly, Spillner noted a fundamental shift in transatlantic dynamics. “What is interesting is I think U.S. players are more willing to look across the Atlantic for opportunities and for business possibilities, maybe from an investment perspective but also from really triggering business or concluding business,” he said. “There’s more willingness from U.S. investors, bankers, and so on to look into Europe for opportunities.”

This represents a reversal of the traditional pattern. Europeans have always made the pilgrimage to American capital; now Americans are actively scouting European assets drawn by pricing differences and, perhaps, uncertainty about domestic policy directions.

The geography of capital

For European biotechs, 2026 may represent an inflection point, though not necessarily the one they expected. Dr. Gil Bar-Nahum, Managing Director at Jefferies International, described a market “as robust as it’s been in the last four years,” driven by a phenomenon he calls capital recycling. When Jefferies sold Merus, one portfolio manager made $100 million overnight. “Now what should I buy?” the investor asked. “If I sit on cash, my LPs will see me sitting on undeployed cash and say, what do I pay you for?”

This flood of redeployed capital has created what Dr. Bar-Nahum characterizes as a squinting effect: investors who previously screened for 70% probability of success, or later stage assets, now may be more inclined to go earlier or now accept 50%, simply because they must deploy. The filter has loosened. The money must move.

Yet Spillner cautioned that momentum remains tentative. Investors are “in the listening mode right now, so not necessarily so much into execution. They’re closely monitoring the scene, but they don’t yet see a high density of transactions.”

The persistent stereotype remains: European companies are “under-managed and under-financed,” as one hedge fund manager told Carlos Buesa, CEO of Spanish biotech Oryzon. The cliché endures like a bad accent: Europeans taking siestas while Americans hustle. “But at Oryzon we work 24/7,” he added.

Valuation advantages

What Europe lacks in perception, it compensates for in price. Buesa’s company, approaching Phase III in psychiatry with promising oncology data showing 100% response rates in AML, would command $600-700 million on NASDAQ. In Madrid, it trades at $280 million. “That’s a good price,” he noted.

For investors hunting value, Europe offers a discount bin of quality science. This pricing gap reveals a deeper structural advantage. Oryzon raised €30 million in April; 70% came from US investors. The company trades $3-4 million daily. That is substantial liquidity for a European stock. Buesa has cultivated what he calls “a whole variation of investor profiles,” from short-term traders capturing 15% discounts to strategic investors betting on eventual M&A multiples.

Mark Krul, CSO at Oncode Accelerator, the Dutch government’s €325 million cancer drug development fund, sees European valuations as a competitive strength. “If you look at valuations, our companies are valuated lower,” he explained. “So what we see is indeed an influx of investors to European companies. And that’s increasing now.”

The China factor

Then there’s China, the conference’s unavoidable subtext and perhaps the most significant force in the leveling of the global playing field. “They are now at a point where they are from a quality level, from a scientific level, from the way how they do research, they are already becoming serious to deliver.”

The Chinese presence was, by all accounts, substantial. Dr. Bar-Nahum noted a pragmatic reality: “IP protection has always been an issue in China. Reverse engineering is a real thing.” Yet he also described European companies licensing Chinese assets. For example, Winward’s TSLP from Kelun Biotech, and Verdiva’s assets from Sciwind. The science is legitimate; the management and marketing expertise remains Western.

Spillner drew parallels to other industries where Europe has lost ground. “We have seen that multiple times, and right now it’s in the automotive industry,” he said.

The warning extends to pharma. “Development is highly cost competitive, being transferred to China because it’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s maybe a little bit less regulation,” Spillner explained. “So it’s very comfortable to go there. And again, building this dependency that we always complain about, but we are exactly going into the same direction.”

Hubert Birner, Managing Partner at TVM Capital Life Sciences, sees China’s emergence as potentially very positive for Europe. “There’s a lot of activity that we see for the Chinese to significantly increase their presence in Europe,” he said. “The benefit for the Europeans could be that with the Chinese, they could continue to grow, especially with the resources that they will be missing from the Americans.”

Krul confirmed the shift: “Three to five years back, China hardly had any true innovations. They were merely copying and developing me-too products. Nowadays, big pharma is already acquiring Chinese-based companies with state-of-the-art technologies.”

But Buesa sees the dynamic differently—as a threat. “Europe is going to struggle to be what it has been for many years, which has been a provider of high technology in the biomedical sector to the US,” he warned. Chinese labor costs are lower, regulatory processes centralized and responsive. “The Chinese government can change things to make their companies more competitive very quickly.”

Lubor Gaal, working as CBO for Norwegian and UK biotechs, offered nuance: “China can be best in class. But whether they can be first in class,” he paused, “that’s the question.”

Structural impediments

Europe’s challenges extend beyond perception. Regulatory frameworks that seem designed for a different era constrain financial innovation. Warrants, common in US financing, trigger accounting nightmares across European jurisdictions. In Oryzon’s recent transaction, European investors threatened to withdraw if warrants were included. “Too much trouble,” Buesa shrugged.

Then there’s the fragmentation. Five separate stock exchanges: Euronext, London, the Nordics, DAX, and Switzerland where one would suffice. “These are private companies,” Buesa noted. “The owners are making their money. Unless they see the possibility to make more money if they merge, this is my shop and I don’t want to share.”

Krul identified this as Europe’s critical missing link: “We don’t have an appropriate stock market like Nasdaq. We built Merus in Europe. We have a lot of European investors. But when you want to become big, you have to go to Nasdaq for IPO.”

Spillner pointed to another challenge: biotech must compete for capital with more fashionable sectors. “Speaking of AI, speaking of defense, there’s other focus areas where people can make good money,” he said. Until the tech bubble potentially corrects, healthcare may struggle to recapture investor imagination.

Operator optimism

Despite these headwinds, the Europeans I spoke with radiated cautious optimism. Michael Salzmann, CEO of AL-S Pharma, described strong interest from big pharma and large biotechs, with recent deals highlighting flexible terms and increasingly creative approaches to balancing risk.

“There has been significant interest from top-ten pharma and large biotech players,” he said, “with recent transactions showing a high degree of flexibility in deal structuring and an increasing use of creative, risk-balanced approaches”.

Spillner’s meetings were “positive, constructive.” The infrastructure for momentum exists. “Talking to non-equity investors from the lending side, structured financing, they all have a lot of money to put to work,” he noted. “So per se, cash is not the critical part. It’s more the mental idea of, yeah, let’s go back and invest into life science and biotech.”

Krul noted that approximately 50% of Oncode Accelerator’s project applications now come from the US, “not a complete surprise at this moment.” European governments are investing heavily: the Netherlands alone has committed over a billion euros to biotech infrastructure in coming years. “Here in the US we see it’s actually getting less interest politically,” Krul observed. “So they’re breaking down over here. We’re building up.”

And there’s the Jefferies conference in London, a European alternative gaining traction. Dr. Bar-Nahum, who co-created it, reported that clients thanked him in the Waldorf hallways: “You’ve saved us a ton of money. I don’t need to bring the rest of my team to San Francisco because I’ve found your conference is super productive.” Jefferies has become what he calls “a biotech accelerator,” providing efficiency without the spectacle.

Walking back to my hotel through Union Square, I passed an executive explaining to his colleague why pre-clinical companies struggle to get meetings at JP Morgan anymore. “Pharma wants late-stage assets,” he said. “The risk tolerance has shifted.”

It struck me that as the playing field levels, with American investors looking east, Chinese science maturing, and European governments doubling down, Europe’s advantage might not be just valuation or government funding. It might be patience itself, the willingness to nurture early science in an era when American capital increasingly demands de-risked certainty. The question is whether that patience will be rewarded before the next wave of competition washes over them.