By Unmesh Lal, Vice President, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Frost & Sullivan
Last week in London, I had the privilege of joining a panel on Global Pharma Market Outlook & Strategic Partnerships at the Global Pharma Tech Summit 2026 (18–19 May, Radisson Blu Hotel London Heathrow).
What stood out most, across the room and across conversations, is that 2026 is not a “return to normal.” It is a reset year where pricing power, supply resilience, and external innovation mechanics are being re-written at the same time.
From our Frost & Sullivan vantage point, the global pharma market remains in growth mode, $1,627.73B (2025) to $1,722.05B (2026), ~5.8% growth, but the centre of gravity is moving fast. Large molecules are outpacing small molecules in growth, and the winners are increasingly defined by deliverability, evidence, and partner ecosystems, not molecule novelty alone.
I’m grateful to have shared the stage with fellow panelists Gaurav Sanganee, Rupert Holmes, Jalilah Gibson, and Nasir Hannan, with Badri Wadawadigi moderating the discussion.
Below are my key takeaways, with an explicit focus on what this means for strategic partnerships.
1) Growth is real but it is modality-skewed and execution-led
The topline market expansion in 2026 masks a more important story, where growth is coming from. In our 2026 outlook, large molecules grow ~11.1% vs ~3% for small molecules (2025–2026), signalling that platform capabilities such as CMC, analytics, conjugation know-how, cold chain, and evidence generation are becoming board-level constraints.
Partnership implication: Capability gaps, including analytics, fill–finish, conjugation, and RWE enablement, will not be solved fast enough internally. Expect more capability-stacking partnerships and tougher partner due diligence around execution certainty.
2) Pricing & access policy is compressing value-capture windows and partnerships must “design for reimbursement”
A defining pressure point for 2026 is the global convergence of affordability mandates and price scrutiny. In the US, Medicare’s negotiated prices for the initial set of 10 drugs came into effect on 1 January 2026, marking a structural shift in pricing dynamics and signalling that price realisation risk is no longer theoretical.
In our outlook, policy, patents, and pricing pressure compress value-capture windows.
Partnership implication: Successful alliances will increasingly be structured around evidence and outcomes, not only commercial rights. This includes RWE collaborations, outcomes-based contracting capabilities, patient support ecosystems, and access-routing partnerships.
3) GLP-1s proved the point: the operating model can be as valuable as the molecule
One of the sharpest examples of the shift from product to platform is the GLP‑1 category. Our analysis highlights high discontinuation rates, 46.5% in T2D and 64.8% in obesity without diabetes over 12 months, which transfers value from prescription to persistence infrastructure including titration support, side-effect management, refill orchestration, behavioural engagement, and channel integration.
Partnership implication: The next wave of partnerships will reward companies that can monetise persistence and outcomes through payer and employer access models, as well as retail and digital continuity ecosystems.
4) External innovation is changing shape: optioned, milestone-heavy, sovereignty-aligned becomes the new default
We are seeing external innovation evolve beyond classic licensing playbooks. In our 2026 outlook, China-origin licensing remains a primary external innovation lever, and deal structures increasingly skew toward option-heavy, milestone-weighted constructs that align with sovereignty and risk management realities.
Partnership implication: Business development teams will need stronger deal architecture capabilities, including scenario-based milestones, manufacturing and data covenants, region-specific governance, and contingency-driven supply clauses.
5) Supply resilience is now license to operate, not a procurement KPI
The last few years taught the industry that reliability beats theoretical efficiency. In the 2026 outlook, supply resilience becomes license-to-operate, a strategic rather than operational mandate.
Partnership implication: Expect more dual-sourcing, localisation, and strategic capacity reservations, particularly for critical materials and complex biologics value chains. Partnerships will increasingly include resilience KPIs such as lead times, redundancy, and quality maturity, not only commercial metrics.
6) CDMO partnerships bifurcate: cost-led commodity vs execution-certainty for next-gen modalities
A key pattern we highlighted is that mAb CDMOs are splitting into two business models, cost-led commodity manufacturing and execution-certainty-led next-generation partnership models.
Partnership implication: Sponsor companies must decide what they are buying, unit cost or certainty of outcome. In 2026, the premium will increasingly accrue to partners that can demonstrate robustness across tech transfer, analytics, QA, and schedule integrity.
7) AI moves from pilots to audit-ready workflows and governance becomes a partnership requirement
The AI conversation has moved beyond “could we?” to “can we defend it?” Our 2026 outlook calls out that AI in drug discovery will transition toward clinical productivity enablement, with audit-ready adoption emerging as the next critical milestone.
Broader industry dynamics point to regulatory and compliance expectations catching up with deployment.
Partnership implication: AI and data partnerships will increasingly require shared governance models, including model risk management, data provenance, validation, monitoring, and accountability. Without governance, these partnerships will struggle to scale.
The 2026 partnership playbook
The implications of these shifts are clear. Partnerships need to be reframed around outcomes, combining evidence, access, and persistence rather than focusing solely on asset ownership. Organisations must build resilience into alliances and treat supply continuity as strategic value. Execution certainty should become the default approach for complex modalities, while deal architecture must evolve toward more flexible, milestone-driven structures aligned with geopolitical realities. Finally, AI governance needs to be embedded from the outset to ensure scalability and regulatory compliance.
Final reflection
If there is one unifying takeaway from the discussion, it is this, strategic partnerships are no longer a growth lever, they are becoming a structural necessity.
In a world defined by pricing pressure, biological complexity, supply volatility, and digital disruption, no company can win alone. The next phase of pharma leadership will belong to those that can design, orchestrate, and scale partnerships as a core competitive advantage.
