The gap between dealmaking and doing

The consulting firm EY, in its 2026 Firepower report, noted something that should give every transaction team pause: over 40% of analysts covering the top 25 pharma companies are negative on M&A and partnership prospects, even as the companies themselves remain bullish. That divergence matters. It suggests that the market sees what many internal teams are reluctant to acknowledge – that executing on M&A is harder than executing a deal, and the two are not the same thing.

Speed of transaction is running well ahead of operational and systems readiness to integrate what’s being acquired. The structures are becoming more complex too; staged closings, asset carve-outs, option-to-acquire arrangements, ring-fenced operations. Each one adds a layer of integration difficulty that a well-crafted term sheet cannot resolve.

Where it goes wrong

In our experience, the integration challenges that derail life sciences M&A are rarely the ones that looked like risks at due diligence. They’re the ones that weren’t asked about.

Process infrastructure that looks functional in isolation but wasn’t designed to scale or connect. ERP systems that are technically compatible but operationally misaligned. Labelling, compliance, and regulatory frameworks that vary by site, by market, by legacy ownership structure. People and institutional knowledge that disappear quietly in the first six months, taking with them an understanding of how things actually work, not how the documentation says they work.

None of this is inevitable. But it requires a different kind of attention than most integration programmes give it.

Due diligence is where integration succeeds or fails

The single most effective thing a life sciences organisation can do to protect its M&A investment is treat due diligence as the first stage of integration planning; not a separate, parallel activity that hands over a report and steps back.

That means asking the operational questions alongside the financial ones. What does the process landscape actually look like? Where are the dependencies? What systems are in place, and what are they really doing? Where does the regulatory complexity sit, and who carries the knowledge of how to navigate it? What are the TSA commitments, and are they realistic?

The answers to these questions don’t just inform risk assessment. They shape the integration plan, the timeline, the resource requirements, and the governance structure. Get them early, and you build on solid ground. Discover them at go-live, and you’re managing a crisis.

Precision over pace

The life sciences M&A market in 2026 rewards those who can move with both speed and precision. The deals are there. The capital is there. The strategic rationale is clear. What will separate the transactions that deliver from those that disappoint is the quality of the thinking, and the quality of the execution, that happens between signing and stabilisation.

Buying well is one skill. Integrating well is another. The best organisations in this space are investing in both. The rest will spend the next few years unpicking the consequences of treating integration as something that can be figured out along the way.

It can’t. It never could. And in a market moving at this pace, the cost of finding that out the hard way is higher than ever.