The latest BPSI shows dramatic improvements in biopharma conditions and a level of optimism not seen in years.
It’s official: Biopharma is finally in a good mood.
For the first time since the four-year downturn that followed the pandemic, industry sentiment has moved into positive territory. The Endpoints News Biopharma Sentiment Index headline score surged to 105 in Q3, up from 96 the prior quarter. Anything above 100 is considered upbeat.
The last year has been a wild ride. The BPSI, which started in dismal territory a year ago, climbed swiftly and steadily, clocking a nearly 29 point increase. In Q3, sentiment rose across each of the 10 measures in our survey. The mood has changed so much that a few respondents even spoke of early signs of speculative bubbles — in dealmaking activity and AI investments specifically. This industry hasn’t felt the least bit carbonated in a very long time.
The Biopharma Sentiment Index is a global benchmark produced by Endpoints Signal. Every quarter we put the same 10 core questions to people across biopharma, covering five key areas: business conditions, company finances, the funding climate, regulation and hiring. The result is an easy-to-grasp headline number, with subindexes tracking Current Conditions and Future Expectations. A separate rotating set of questions takes on issues of the moment. This quarter: job security, dealmaking and AI budgets.
The BPSI draws from the expert subscriber base at Endpoints News. This edition captures the views of 569 verified industry insiders, more than a quarter of whom are C-suite executives. The survey was in the field Aug. 13 to Sept. 15.
Steep improvement in business conditions
The BPSI is built from two combined subindexes: Current Conditions measures how respondents rate conditions today compared with a year ago, while Future Expectations explores what they expect a year from now (see methodology for how they’re calculated). The split is important, because “how things feel right now” and “how people think things will feel next year” don’t move in lockstep — and the gap is often where predictive value lives.
In Q3, Current Conditions jumped to 103 from 87 last quarter. Expectations for the year ahead increased to 106 from 102. The industry, on average, expects more good things to come.
The factor that increased most was current business conditions, which recorded the highest sentiment score we’ve seen so far: 147 — a figure so high we had to go back and check the numbers.
The policy environment was the only category that remained negative — and still deeply so. As one respondent put it: “With more stability and science-first policy-making, the sector would be on fire right now.”
The present catches up
The biggest surprise is where the improvement came from: the present. Current conditions jumped 16 points overall in Q3, four times the rise in expectations. For the BPSI’s first three readings, respondents kept telling us things were bad now but were going to get better. A year ago, expectations ran roughly 35 points ahead of current conditions. Now the gap is less than 3 points. The brighter future respondents had been predicting has, by their own account, mostly arrived.
That makes the next few quarters a different kind of test: Can biopharma’s gains continue, or will high interest rates and an improving-but-still unstable regulatory environment put an end to the party?
Respondents had plenty to feel good about when the survey opened in mid-August. Biotech stocks were soaring, acquirers were paying up and the IPO window had been thrown open. The pace of dealmaking was the most-cited source of optimism.
The regulatory environment is the only category in which negative answers outnumber positive ones, both for today and the year ahead. But even that continued to show improvement. The Q3 regulatory sentiment has more than tripled from the score of 23 we recorded in our first survey.
This was the first BPSI fielded since Marty Makary resigned as FDA commissioner in May. “There is still more uncertainty regarding the FDA than there should be,” one biotech executive wrote, “but with interim leadership, the ship has been steadied.”
Fault lines
A rising index can sometimes hide stark differences of opinion. Respondents in investing roles (126) and at financial firms (127) are the most upbeat in the survey, and C-suite executives aren’t far behind at 117. At the other end sit scientists (87) and big pharma employees (80), the gloomiest groups we track.
Some of the biggest gaps in biopharma sentiment stretched even wider in recent months. Groups that were already bullish became more so, while some of the most pessimistic soured further: See investors vs scientists, biotech vs big pharma, and Asia vs Europe.
Biopharma job security
These fault lines spilled into the sense of job security. This quarter we asked respondents a blunt question: If you lost your job tomorrow, how confident are you that you’d find something equivalent within six months? Overall, 58% said they were confident, while 38% were not. For scientists and people at big pharma companies, opinions were flipped; fewer than half of respondents thought they could land on their feet.
Layoffs have been easing across the industry, but the market is hardly healed. “The job market remains difficult,” one biotech vice president wrote, “and I know several colleagues who were laid off last year and are still looking for work.”
Divergence in hiring
Biotech and big pharma are having very different years. The 29-point gap in sentiment is the widest it’s been since the survey began.
Big pharma gave lower marks than their biotech peers on all 10 questions, and the distance was greatest on jobs. That tracks. In this year’s recovery, it’s the biotechs that are being acquired, licensed and taken public. Large drugmakers are the ones writing checks, cutting costs and racing to refill pipelines before patents expire.
Just over half of biotech respondents (52%) expect their companies to add staff over the next 12 months, and only 15% expect cuts. Big pharma is almost the mirror image: 44% expect their employers to shrink and 14% expect them to grow.
Both splits are similar to what we found in the spring, but the gap is even wider now.
Deals, deals, deals
If one thing explains biopharma’s good mood, it’s the pace of dealmaking. For the third survey in a row, respondents named it their top reason for optimism, and that lead keeps growing: 38% picked it in Q3, more than double the share a year ago.
There have been plenty of high-profile deals to keep the champagne flowing — at least four acquisitions of $10 billion or more just since June.
More deals to come
A 57% majority expects more deals a year from now, and just 7% expect fewer. Our dealmaking-optimism index has held steady for two straight quarters.
The message from respondents is clear: The deals boom continues.
XBI and the BPSI
The stock market has tracked the BPSI all along the way. The XBI, the benchmark exchange-traded fund for biotech, gained 54% in the year through Oct. 2. Stocks ripped along at a furious pace in the second quarter. The XBI hit a five-year high in July and peaked on Aug. 19, jumping 6% as Moderna’s shares nearly tripled on late-stage results for the mRNA cancer vaccine it’s developing with Merck.
The rally has cooled a bit since. On Sept. 16, a day after our survey closed, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in three years. By Oct. 2, the XBI was 9% off its August high. It’s possible the Q3 reading will prove to be a high-water mark.
Even at the biotech peak, insiders weren’t necessarily betting on it with their own money. We asked respondents where they’d put $20,000 of their own cash in order to maximize returns over the next year, a question we’ve posed once before. Just 15% chose biotech, the same share we saw going into Q1 before the XBI run-up. Among scientists, just 6% would.
An S&P 500 fund remains the favorite investment at 42%, followed by a tech fund at 25%.
Artificial intelligence
Faith in AI keeps inching up. In Q3, 76% of respondents said they expect AI to increase drug-discovery productivity over the next 12 months, up from 74% in Q1 and 69% a year ago. The believers are a measured bunch: Two-thirds expect a moderate lift, and only 9% expect a great one.
Following that trend, AI deals are starting to stack up. Genentech signed a pact that could top $1.5 billion with AI antibody designer Earendil Labs in September. Chai Discovery, which raised $400 million in July, landed GSK in October as its sixth pharma partner in nine months. And Iambic Therapeutics, an AI-driven cancer drug developer backed by Nvidia, brought in $150 million in an IPO.
AI cost discipline
But how companies are spending on AI internally is another matter. This quarter, we asked where companies are applying the most cost discipline to AI. A third of companies said AI spending is protected or growing, while a quarter said their companies weren’t spending meaningfully on AI to begin with. That leaves about 43% who said their companies were putting limits on AI spending, either for everyday tools for staff (28%), R&D (5%) or both (10%).
Some of the shine on AI has faded even as the money pours in. A year ago, 18% of respondents called AI their top reason for optimism, a close second on the list. Now only 11% say it’s their leading factor, slipping down to fourth place.
Several respondents described AI as a new tech competitor for the same old biotech investor dollars. Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s drug discovery arm, raised $2.1 billion in May without having disclosed a single drug candidate.
Optimists vs pessimists
If dealmaking is leading the biopharma industry into a newfound period of optimism, politics remains the one thing holding it back. When we asked respondents about their top reasons for concern, politics was far and away at the front of the list. But in recent months, China has moved into #2 and taken some share from political concerns.
Some of the fear around US political upheaval has been tested and found survivable. Several respondents said the FDA has steadied under its new interim leadership, and trade groups say a new user-fee agreement sets aside money to rehire drug reviewers lost to layoffs.
On pricing, events largely followed the forecasts that BPSI respondents shared in Q2, when 53% predicted the administration's most-favored-nation push would be watered down. Twenty-six drugmakers have now signed voluntary pricing deals with the White House, and the mandatory Medicare pilot that CMS finalized on Sept. 30 exempts those companies. Projected Medicare savings shrank 96%, to $440 million from $11.9 billion.
The threats haven't completely vanished: Tariffs of up to 100% on imported brand-name drugs took effect in September, leaving some companies exposed, and Heidi Overton, the nominee to lead the FDA, won't get a Senate vote until at least after the Nov. 3 midterms.
The worry that grew is China. The share of respondents who named "innovation in China" as their biggest concern doubled to 14%, vaulting it from sixth place to second.
Everyone, it seems, wants to cut deals with China. In May, Bristol Myers Squibb committed up to $15.2 billion for more than a dozen early-stage drugs from Hengrui, and Pfizer signed a 12-drug cancer pact with Innovent worth up to $10.5 billion.
The pace hasn't let up. In the weeks after our survey closed, Eli Lilly signed a discovery pact with Beijing's InnoCare, Merck agreed to pay $400 million upfront for a preclinical cancer drug from SciBrunch, Novo Nordisk licensed a weight-loss pill from Hengrui and Novartis threw down $575 million for an mRNA-based therapy from Abogen. Roche has done at least four China deals since August.
China rises as a threat
For big drugmakers with pipeline gaps to fill, China is a key solution. But for Western startups pitching to the same investors, China is the competition. That's why China lands on both sides of the survey: 11% of respondents still call it their top reason for optimism, the third-most-cited.
Washington has taken notice. The surge in cross-border deals is drawing scrutiny from lawmakers who want to slow it, and a bipartisan bill now in the Senate would have the Treasury Department screen biotech deals with China.
What comes next
One year in, the Biopharma Sentiment Index has traveled from 76 to 105. Every measure of the present has turned positive except regulation. The debate among respondents has moved from whether the recovery is real to how much more juice is left. The next reading will show whether we're in a new era of positivity for the industry, or if Q3 was just a transient moment in the sun.
Methodology
The Biopharma Sentiment Index (BPSI) provides a disciplined, forward-looking measure of confidence across the global biopharmaceutical industry. The structure draws inspiration from the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, adapting that framework to the unique dynamics of life sciences.
The survey universe is drawn from the Endpoints subscriber base, which comprises a wide cross-section of the global biopharma community. The sample includes investors across venture, private equity and public markets; C-suite and senior executives; clinical and R&D staff; commercial employees; and policy and regulatory professionals. Company types span biotech, pharma, CROs, CDMOs, generics manufacturers and financial institutions. Access requires an Endpoints account to ensure that all responses are tied to verified industry participants.
Responses are analyzed by role, company type and geography to identify significant categorical variations. The Q3 2026 survey was in the field Aug. 13 to Sept. 15, with 569 survey completions.
The survey is conducted online at the end of a calendar quarter. Respondents are asked, via emailed invitation, to complete a short survey that balances rigor with ease of completion. The median time to complete it is just over three minutes.
Survey design
The BPSI survey consists of five paired questions that form the backbone of the index. Each question is posed in two forms: one focused on current conditions and another framed as expectations for the year ahead. Responses employ standardized three-point scales — such as “Better / Same / Worse” — with slight variations to align with the wording of the question. A variation of “Don’t know” or “Not applicable” is always available, and those responses were excluded from scoring.
Creating the baseline
The Biopharma Sentiment Index (BPSI) uses a small set of core sentiment questions split between current conditions and future expectations, and an index value constructed from diffusion-style scoring. The focus of questions, wording and scaling system is unique to biopharma and was developed by Endpoints Signal.
Diffusion scales like the BPSI are excellent at capturing breadth of sentiment, but they come with a well-established positivity bias, particularly in the context of business sentiment surveys. The share saying “better” tends to exceed those saying “worse” — even in neutral years. To correct for systematic bias, we normalize the BPSI to “100 = neutral” footing. Readings significantly above or below the 100 baseline should indicate net optimistic or pessimistic conditions.
To determine our rebasing factor, we analyzed the long‑run experience of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment series. Michigan uses its own version of weighting — by indexing a score of 100 to a single base year: 1966. This formula for rebasing has been found to significantly overcompensate for positivity bias, resulting in an average consumer sentiment score of roughly 84.5 instead of 100.
Using Michigan’s decades of publicly available data, we can calculate a rebasing factor that should put us much closer to our intended 100 = neutral baseline. From the historic records, we calculate that the average unweighted per-question diffusion score in Michigan’s index is 111. From there, we arrive at a simple neutralizing multiplier of 0.9 (𝑘 = 100/111 = 0.9), which should more accurately result in “100 = neutral” scaling.
This rebasing method is simple, keeps the index results closer to the raw data, and is supported by an extensive record of data.
Index construction
The five current-condition questions are used to create the Current Conditions subindex (BPSI-CC), while the five forward-looking items are averaged to form the Expectations subindex (BPSI-EX).
For each of the five questions in a subindex, a Relative Score (RS) value is determined by subtracting the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses. Each subindex is an average of these five Relative Score values, rebased to 100 and scaled using the neutralizing multiplier. These subindexes are combined into the headline BPSI with a weighting of 40% current conditions, 60% future expectations.
BPSI-CC = ((average RS_CC) + 100) * 0.90
BPSI-EX = ((average RS_EX) + 100) * 0.90
BPSI = (0.4 * BPSI-CC) + (0.6 * BPSI-EX)
Since the rebasing is only done for the final indexes (CC, EX, BPSI), those figures will appear lower than Relative Score results viewed in isolation. The heavier weighting on expectations mirrors the methodology used in the Michigan consumer confidence framework and reflects the greater importance of forward-looking sentiment for forecasting purposes.
The first issuance of the survey established a base period. Subsequent waves are reported both as absolute scores on the “100 = neutral” scale and as quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year comparisons. The “100 = neutral” guideline is neither precise nor expected to be consistent over time. It provides a key reference in the early quarters of the BPSI, but it’s likely that quarter-over-quarter comparisons will ultimately take precedence, just as they have with the Michigan index.
To keep the BPSI responsive to current issues, each quarterly wave includes a small set of “pulse” questions. These rotate quarterly and cover topical issues such as the outlook for M&A and the anticipated productivity impact of AI. The pulse questions provide context for the BPSI report but are not factored into the headline sentiment scores.
Several open-text prompts are included. These qualitative responses provide nuance and color to the quarterly reports.
Data quality and checks
Several safeguards are in place to ensure the quality of responses. For example, results are screened for duplicate submissions by login-defined URL and flagged for unusually fast completions paired with straight-line answers. Additional safeguards may be taken as necessary.
With each release, the report discloses sample size and any methodological changes so that users can interpret the index transparently. A full methodology is updated with each quarterly report. This appendix includes the core-question wording, demographics, response distributions and indexing formulas. The consistent application of these methods will ensure a reliable measure of industry sentiment.
Methodology updates
Q4 2025 is restated to BPSI 76 (CC 55, EX 91) from the published BPSI 78 (CC 55, EX 91). A Q2 methodology change (dropping "don't know" from the denominator) resulted in a revision to our inaugural reading; Q1 and Q2 readings are unchanged.
Citing the BPSI
The BPSI was created to be a tool for anyone with an interest in biopharma. Endpoints welcomes you to use our data and charts, with credit given to Endpoints Signal, the intelligence platform of Endpoints News. When possible, please include either a link to this report or the full URL so others may discover it, too: https://endpoints.news/biopharma-sentiment-index-q3-2026/
If you have any feedback about the BPSI or ideas for future pulse questions, drop us a line at signal@endpoints.news. We love hearing from you.
