At the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, there was a lot of movement on genetic medicines and particular cell therapies, particularly CAR Ts. But in adjacent rooms there were conversations with companies rethinking how medicine is delivered, activated, and experienced by patients. Across vaccines, oncology, neurodegeneration, and neurosurgery, several companies positioned themselves not as single-asset stories, but as builders of platforms that can evolve the landscape of medicine and healthcare.
Vaxart: Reimagining vaccines as pills
Sean Tucker, PhD, senior vice president and CSO of Vaxart, said the company is based on a simple but radical idea: vaccines should come to patients, not the other way around. The company’s oral tablet platform challenges the assumption that effective vaccines must be injected, offering a potentially transformative alternative for annual immunization programs like flu, COVID, and norovirus.
The science, however, was anything but simple. Proteins delivered to the gut are normally treated as food and rapidly degraded. According to Tucker, Vaxart spent years engineering a solution that forces the immune system to recognize these proteins as threats. Its non-replicating adenovirus delivers antigen directly into intestinal cells, paired with a built-in danger signal—a double-stranded RNA hairpin—that alerts the immune system something foreign is present.
The tablet itself is engineered to survive stomach acid and dissolve only in the intestine, where mucosal immunity can be activated. Crucially, Vaxart uses the same delivery system and manufacturing process across all indications, swapping only the antigen gene. That platform efficiency could be decisive during pandemics or annual strain updates.
Tucker said that with COVID comparator data expected this year and a Phase II norovirus program showing strong protection driven by intestinal antibodies, Vaxart is betting that convenience, mucosal immunity, and reuse of a standardized platform can shift how the world thinks about vaccines.
Oncolytics Biotech: Accelerating the fight against cancer
Oncolytics CEO Jared Kelly is on a mission to commercialize what he believes is an undervalued asset that “should already be on the market.” Pelareorep, the company’s intravenously delivered oncolytic virus, has been tested in nearly 1,300 patients across more than 20 studies, with a safety profile that has remained consistent for decades.
Unlike most oncolytic viruses, which must be injected directly into tumors, pelareorep is administered through an IV. It evades immune clearance by hitchhiking on immune cells, circulates freely, and selectively replicates inside mutated cancer cells—particularly those with RAS pathway defects. Normal cells flush the virus out; cancer cells cannot.
Kelly’s strategy has been to refocus the company away from crowded indications and toward gastrointestinal (GI) cancers with high unmet need, including pancreatic, anal, and colorectal cancers. Across these settings, pelareorep has shown additive efficacy when combined with chemotherapy or checkpoint inhibitors, extending survival without adding toxicity.
With FDA encouragement around accelerated approval pathways in rare GI tumors, Oncolytics is positioning pelareorep as a broadly applicable immunotherapy backbone—one that could revive interest in oncolytic viruses as the next wave beyond checkpoint inhibitors.
Coya Therapeutics: Restoring immune balance in neurodegeneration
Coya Therapeutics is built on decades of academic work showing that dysfunctional regulatory T cells (Tregs) play a central role in neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and frontotemporal dementia. Rather than targeting the brain directly, Coya’s approach restores immune balance systemically.
The company’s lead program combines low-dose IL-2 to expand and activate Tregs with CTLA-4 to suppress the inflammatory environment that would otherwise cause those Tregs to lose function. By stabilizing both the adaptive and innate immune systems, Coya aims to stop neuroinflammation and halt disease progression.
Arun Swaminathan, PhD, CEO of Coya Therapeutics, said that early clinical data suggest the therapy may stabilize functional decline in ALS—an outcome that would be meaningful in a disease where progression is typically rapid and irreversible. With a Phase IIb ALS trial underway and an FTD study launching in 2026, Coya entered JPM unusually well-capitalized, allowing discussions to focus on long-term partnerships rather than near-term fundraising.
Coya is also exploring combination strategies, including preclinical work pairing its immune-modulating platform with GLP-1 agonists in Alzheimer’s disease—reflecting its belief that neurodegeneration will ultimately require combination therapies.
NeuroOne: The diagnostic-therapeutic combo
Dave Rosa, CEO of NeuroOne, arrived with the company’s incredibly thin neural devices, which integrate medication delivery, therapy, and diagnosis all into one. Originally developed to record brain activity in epilepsy patients, NeuroOne’s electrodes can now also stimulate tissue, ablate problematic regions, and deliver drugs or gene therapies directly into targeted areas of the brain.
The devices’ small footprint—just 0.8 mm in diameter—allows for minimally invasive procedures, often with patients unaware they’ve undergone brain surgery once discharged. Importantly, the same platform scales from mice to humans, enabling pharmaceutical companies to use a consistent delivery and monitoring tool across development stages.
As gene and cell therapies for neurological diseases advance, NeuroOne’s ability to confirm accurate delivery and track therapeutic impact in real time could become essential. For pharma partners, the value lies not just in delivery but in de-risking development by showing early biological effect.
Medicine beyond molecules
Taken together, these JPM conversations revealed a shared theme: innovation is increasingly about how medicine is delivered, not just what molecule is used. Whether through pills instead of needles, viruses instead of chemicals, immune recalibration instead of suppression, or precision devices that merge diagnosis with therapy, these companies are challenging entrenched assumptions—and positioning themselves as platforms rather than one-shot bets.
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