Crystal Ball: At JP Morgan, Companies Predict Trump Administration Impacts

By Allison Proffitt 

February 6, 2025 | Market questions always arise with the changing of presidential administration in the United States, though this year’s uncertainty seems a bit heightened. Expected outlooks to NIH funding and other regulatory and even Department of Government Efficiencies (DOGE) changes came up in analyst questions after some of the presentations at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference last month.  

Not every speaker was challenged on the NIH outlook, and as would be expected, no speakers were willing to make broad predictions, but companies who see themselves as somewhat insulated from government uncertainties were rosier overall than others.  

Serge Saxonov, CEO of 10X Genomics, said about half of his company’s business is based in the US, and while he estimated 75% of that US business is academic, only about 40% is funded by NIH. “So you get down to about 20% as NIH [funded] of the total business,” he calculated. “The direct NIH exposure is about a few percent, so relatively small.” He didn’t foresee dramatic changes, only because customers have been anticipating and preparing for changes during much of 2024. “What we saw last year was already customers anticipating the uncertainty of funding and being more conservative, more cautious in their spending. So some of that has already been baked in even before the election.” 

And Saxonov is relying on the universality of life sciences research to provide stability. “There’s a bipartisan sentiment that people want to cure diseases, right? After everything is said and done, historically, NIH almost universally comes out in a good spot!”  

Christian Henry, President and CEO of PacBio, calculated an exposure of about 20% of PacBio’s revenue is either directly or indirectly funded by NIH. PacBio customers, Henry reported, “are generally a bit confused” about what to expect from government funding. “The problem is, confusion creates indecision which slows buying cycles,” he added. Echoing the stance that Saxonov espoused, Henry said, “Our belief is that—and I think our customers believe—there will still be NIH money there to drive advanced research for these kinds of technologies like ours, and that there will still be opportunities.”  

Henry predicted that the first part of the year would likely see some sales slowdowns as confidence makes its way from customers to purchasing agents who are, “leveraging indecision, so to speak, to delay purchases.”  

Representing Illumina, CEO Jacob Thaysen, was confident that a new administration will not negatively impact the business. “The areas that we are in, both genomics but also multi-omics, are areas that actually likely will see increased funding,” he predicted. “So even though the whole NIH budget might be under pressure… we don’t think it’s going to change a lot.” In fact, Thaysen remembers weathering general uncertainty in the recent past. “Honestly, we have seen a lot of curve balls over the last five years, so I don’t think this is a bigger challenge for us than what we’ve overcome.”