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The Friday Brief for May 8, 2026: Top 20 Companies Making Moves

Several pharma and biopharma companies that were on our Top 20 list in 2025 made headlines this week.

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By: Patrick Lavery

Content Marketing Editor

This week in “The Friday Brief” … Our May issue is now available, but if you can believe it, we’re already working on our annual issue profiling the top 20 companies in pharma and biopharma. And several that were on that list in 2025 made big moves this week.

Bayer reached an agreement to acquire Perfuse Therapeutics, which specializes in R&D for treatment of ischemia-induced ocular diseases. Novartis is adding a new facility in Morrisville, NC. Amgen has invested an additional $300 million in its U.S. manufacturing network. Bristol Myers Squibb has licensed Lonza’s SYNtecan linker-payload platform to help advance an ADC against an undisclosed target. And GSK inked a licensing agreement with SiranBio for an ALK7-targeting siRNA oligonucleotide.

On the acquisition side of things, Alcami completed its purchase of Tjoapack, which we reported on a couple of weeks ago. UCB, meanwhile, announced it is acquiring Candid Therapeutics.

Plenty of partnership happenings as well. AGC Biologics and Novelty Nobility are expanding their manufacturing pact in Japan. Evotec has nominated a preclinical development candidate in its collaboration with Almirall. Epicrispr Biotechnologies and Forge Biologics have a new AAV development and manufacturing agreement. And Cellular Origins and Immatics are partnering on automated cell therapy manufacturing.

Lots more where that came from—check out our breaking news tab, and the May issue of Contract Pharma, at contractpharma.com.

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