Industry Outlook 2026: Trends Transitioning from 2025 into 2026

AI, the Internet of Things, digitalization, and other technologies became standard practice in 2025 for many pharmaceutical companies. Laine Mello, director of marketing at Ecolab Bioprocessing, sees the implementation of these tools as a significant trend in 2025 that will most likely continue into 2026. “The competitive pressure really became undeniable,” Mello explains. “And if you couldn't monitor processes in real time or predict issues before they happened, you were falling behind.”

The development of complex biologics and other novel treatments, which spurred investments and innovations in 2025, will continue to impact the industry. “These complex molecules are really reshaping how the industry thinks about manufacturing flexibility and purification,” Mello says. “The old playbook doesn't work anymore when you're dealing with products like this, sophisticated such as biologics and cell and gene therapies.”

Mello explains that these trends tie into things like sustainability and cost of goods reduction. “Cost of goods reduction is really the defining priority in 26. Pricing pressures are intensifying, particularly for complex biologics and advanced therapies. You know, manufacturers really need to squeeze more production or more productivity out of every single process and every single step that they have so continuous and intensified bioprocessing will help move from being, you know, innovated to becoming an actually standard practice with more adoption of things like modular facilities and multi column chromatography, helping deliver that flexibility without even sacrificing efficiency,” Mello stresses. “The other thing we're seeing into 2026 is this driver that will be solving the technical challenges around complex molecules, so pipelines are filled with high concentration biologics and next gen antibodies that really push the limits of current manufacturing processes … So, stability, aggregation, purification, bottlenecks.”