Tyler Crowe

Big Pharma is in a buying mood today on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

I'm your host, Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors, Lou Whiteman and Meg Frankel.

Now, it's Tuesday.

I know the markets.

It's down quite a bit.

I think the Nasdaq's down about 2% as we are taping.

But hey, you know what?

Volatile times.

Markets are going to market.

Today, we're going to dive into the pharmaceutical industry and specifically the seemingly large wave of M&A that we've seen in recent months.

We're also going to hit some mailbag questions specific to the pharmaceutical industry and kind of look at some of the companies in this industry that we think are doing incredibly well.

Now, at first I thought this was some weird coincidence of seeing several deal announcements in the deal section of the Wall Street Journal recently, but so far, 2026 has been a banner year for M&A in the pharmaceutical industry.

Here's a fascinating stat, guys, on this wave.

So far this year, there have been more deals of $1 billion and more than all of 2025.

Now, I'm sure there's lots of reasons.

We could go into a lot of them.

But for each of you guys, what are some of the things that you're seeing that's driving this seemingly massive wave of consolidation, Lou?

Yeah, and it's not just them.

I mean, part of the reason I specifically saw this, it was in a matter of a couple of weeks, I saw like AbbVie buying an immunology company for about $10 billion.