Bain Capital’s Adam Koppel on private equity’s role in biotech

Koppel shares his expectations for financial markets, dealmaking in 2026

Private equity’s expanding role in biopharma as a growth equity investor reflects both the maturation of the life sciences sector and the rising need for large-scale capital, alongside PE firms’ increasing ability to conduct the technical diligence required for investments once considered too risky for their models.

“Now that the scale is matching the ability to do good diligence and make good investment decisions, you are seeing more comfort in entering the space,” Bain Capital’s Adam Koppel told BioCentury. 

Koppel, a partner at Bain Capital Life Sciences since 2016, is in his second stint at the global private equity firm. He originally joined the firm in 2003 and ran its public equity healthcare investment team for 10 years before leaving to join Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB) as EVP of corporate development and strategy. Two years later, he rejoined Bain to help build its life sciences team, which is primarily focused on growth equity and public market investing across the biopharma space.

Koppel described Bain’s prioritization scheme for scaled investments, which are often $100 million or more. This involves identifying opportunities to underwrite major value-creation events, such as Phase II or Phase III data, and building the diligence needed to have conviction ahead of those binary outcomes.

Koppel believes these large, scaled investments are sustainable into biotech’s future, for both positive and negative reasons. Heavily tranching these deals reduces investor risk while maintaining capital discipline. At the same time, the growth of the biopharma sector has increased the number of situations in which companies need large pools of capital to conduct late-stage trials or launch new drugs.

On the downside, clinical development, regulatory and commercial costs have spiraled such that it is much more expensive to get a drug to market. “From an initial proof of concept, to get a drug to market and an initial launch, that’s three to four times [higher] than what that cost was 15 years ago, coming out of the global financial crisis. That’s a radical change,” Koppel said. 

On the broader markets, Koppel noted there are still uncertainties. While investors may have moved on from drug pricing concerns for now, unpredictability remains around FDA operations and NIH funding.

“I think its very important for this ecosystem to continue to have our relationship with the academic setting and with the basic scientists that are prepping us to be able to run the clinical studies that we like to invest behind,” he said.

One of the other challenges biotech continues to face is a glut of companies. As biotech emerges from a four-year bear market, the number of companies that investors have to keep track of is markedly different from the end of prior bear markets, such as 2001-02 or 2008-09.

“The challenge now of everyone having to follow 800-plus [public] companies — it is just too much,” he said. “There’s a war not only for capital, but for airtime, to get people’s attention.”

Koppel nonetheless remains positive in his expectations for 2026. He pointed to high-quality, clinical-stage private companies coming through at a time when large pharmas remain in need of innovation to drive growth, which will largely come from the smaller biotech partners.

He also detailed how private companies should think about a potential IPO in the coming year, noting that industry is still in the early part of the cycle where strong clinical data is likely required for a company to be a strong IPO candidate.

Finally, Koppel shared his perspective on the NewCo Model, building companies around in-licensed assets from Asia, and its sustainability as a source of new investment opportunities. “I think it’s very sustainable,” he said. “It’s going to be the source of capital for a lot of new companies, so I’m quite optimistic and constructive on this, what we call the ‘SpinCo NewCo Model.’”