Nivolumab/Relatlimab

SAN FRANCISCO — In his third year as CEO of Bristol Myers Squibb, Chris Boerner kicked off the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference with plans for six pivotal readouts of new drugs in 2026. This array of potential medicines for everything from heart disease to cancer to neuropsychiatry will be key in replacing revenues from current bestsellers Opdivo and Eliquis, which are expected to potentially face generic competition in 2028. The $114 billion pharma has been on a dealmaking run to bolster its pipeline and portfolio since Boerner took the helm, acquiring RayzeBio for $4.1 billion , Mirati Therapeutics for $4.8 billion , and Karuna Therapeutics for $14 billion . Boerner sat down with Endpoints News on Tuesday, the day after his JPM presentation, for a wide-ranging discussion of the year ahead and his take on the future of Bristol Myers and the pharma industry. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Andrew Dunn: We’ll get to JPM stuff, but I wanted to actually start with your 2002 PhD dissertation on why some pharmas are better at developing drugs than others. Chris Boerner: Oh, wow. That’s going way back. Dunn: I figured that’d be an interesting place to start. What was your answer in 2002, and how does that hold up today in 2026? Boerner: I have to remember first. What prompted me to look at that question was that I read an article that talked about Bristol Myers Squibb being really great at developing oncology drugs. I called somebody who had graduated from Berkeley a few years before, and I said, ‘I don’t understand why BMS is so much better.’ It turns out nobody has done that work. If you boil it down, the core element is that experience matters. It matters a lot. The data suggested that BMS and other companies that were very good at developing drugs in a given therapeutic area, they had a lot of history of developing in that space. What that meant was they knew the science, they had access to physicians who could help them prosecute that science, they knew how to develop the medicines in terms of clinical trials, so the data showed very clearly they were faster and had a higher probability of success. If you’re doing business development, the idea at the time was these virtual pharmaceutical companies. You could have MBAs and PhDs, and they could go select assets and in-license them and create companies. It turns out that’s very difficult to do, because you don’t know which science to pick. Dunn: What do you think is the biggest change from ’02 to ’26 on that topic? Boerner: It begs the question of how do you ever get into something new. The most successful companies, in many respects, have taken two paths. One is they buy infrastructure, and they don’t screw it up. They keep the people and the knowledge base that exists. Or they follow the science down a path, and it leads them into a new area. A good example of that is how Genentech got into ophthalmology. They followed the science for VEGF in oncology and wove their way over to ophthalmology because that’s where the science takes them. Dunn: There’s not a dogmatic approach of “We don’t do that.” Boerner: Exactly. Companies can be overly strategic and just say, well, we’ll just put blinders on that. You’ve got to be careful about that. When we acquired Rayze right after I became CEO, we made the decision to keep that largely separate. As a result, we did the most important thing: We kept all of those people who had deep expertise. Fundamentally, we’ve kept that as a freestanding unit, and that very much ties into one of the insights I had coming out of that Berkeley work. Dunn: My first JPM was 2019, the year of the Bristol-Celgene deal. Boerner: That was a pretty big deal to happen. Dunn: How do you judge the success of that deal? What are the lessons learned, and anything you’d have done differently? Boerner: Bristol Myers Squibb going into that acquisition, we were a company heavily indexed on two medicines: Eliquis and Opdivo. Every earnings call was about those two medicines. What we accomplished with that deal is to broaden the discussion. I highlighted yesterday that within our growth portfolio, we’ve got four medicines young in the lifecycle, all annualizing to over $1 billion in sales: Camzyos, Breyanzi, Opdualag, and Reblozyl, which is actually analyzing to over $2 billion. That diversity in your business is a real strongpoint for us because you’re not beholden to one or two blockbuster medicines as you think about what the growth trajectory of the company is going to be in the long term. Lessons learned for the future: How you integrate a big acquisition like that has to be done very thoughtfully. There are places we probably could have integrated faster. Dunn: Is there an example? Boerner: Three or four years later, we were still surveying the employee base to say were you heritage Celgene or heritage BMS? But at the time we were doing that, the majority of the people at the company had joined after the Celgene acquisition. In some ways, we ended up distracting ourselves with that, which is one big challenge with any big acquisition. Dunn: $30 billion in deals over the past two years. Do you have a target deal size or general M&A capacity for 2026? Boerner: We are somewhat agnostic on size. Our criteria remain the same: One, it has to be an area of science we know. Two, it has to make strategic sense. And finally, perhaps obviously, but in some cases not obviously, it’s got to make financial sense. Dunn: Is the idea of a megamerger on the table in 2026? Boerner: That’s not our primary focus, to be honest with you. Our primary focus is on doing deals more akin to the ones you’ve seen us do over the last three or four years. Dunn: What led to increasing Bristol’s exposure to neurology, particularly with the anti-psychotic Cobenfy, and what do you see as the future of these diseases, given they feel like the hardest to make traction on? Boerner: They are hard, but the nice thing about the history of Bristol Myers Squibb is we focus on hard things. The next frontier in healthcare, I believe, is going to be brain health. We have some mid-stage programs in Alzheimer’s disease. I’m looking forward to seeing them continue to progress. When we made the decision to invest in Karuna, we were making the decision to do two things: first, commit to neuroscience, not just neurodegeneration, but neuropsych. Because of the nature of the asset we were acquiring and the potential to not just focus on schizophrenia but Alzheimer’s disease psychosis, agitation and cognition, it was a bridge between neuropsych and neurodegeneration. We had already made the commitment to be in this space, and this was an opportunity to expand, but also to bridge. Dunn: Biggest potential opportunity and risk in working with the Trump administration in 2026? Boerner: The biggest opportunity — one of the things that has been refreshing with this administration is they have recognized that access and affordability are absolutely critical. Every dollar associated with a branded medicine, about 50% of that dollar goes to somebody who didn’t take any risk in the discovery, development and certainly isn’t involved in the commercialization of that product. There’s a real opportunity for us to find ways to simplify this healthcare system. The risk, and it’s less of a risk associated with working with this administration, but it’s a risk for the United States in terms of the ecosystem that we have here. We have the best ecosystem for biopharmaceuticals in the world, and it is the envy of the world. This conference is an embodiment of a lot of that ecosystem that doesn’t exist in its form like this anywhere else in the world. But it is not a birthright. There are other places, China is notable among them, that have made a stated ambition and are making great progress in replicating that. The challenge we all have in the United States is how do you strengthen this ecosystem? We have a vested interest as a company that’s been in the United States for over 160 years to ensure that the future of the ecosystem here continues to be as attractive as it is today, if not more attractive. That is the fundamental challenge we have as an industry.