Deals under $500M. Big pharma does a large volume of small tuck-ins; including them would triple
the row count and barely move the totals. Their absence means these numbers are a floor, not a full market count.
Pure licensing and option deals with no change of equity ownership. A large
share of 2026 activity — particularly China-origin assets — is structured this way, so the licensing wave is
real but is not counted here.
Venture financing and IPOs. Different phenomenon.
Undisclosed-value deals appear in tables where structurally significant
(large nonprofit hospital combinations, the one antitrust block) but never contribute to any total.