Combination: The Drug Delivery Word Of The Year For 2026
By Tom von Gunden, Chief Editor, Drug Delivery Leader
About slop, its Word of the Year for 2025, longstanding language documenter and definer Merriam-Webster posted this:
“We define slop as ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.’ All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters.”
In the context of launching into an online commentary about my own selection of a “choice” word, M-W’s core definition of slop as “digital content of low quality” should give me pause. Nevertheless, I will forge ahead, proactively defending my actions by applying to them the label the dictionary giant employed to distinguish the makers of its online announcement from content creators perpetrating yet more slop: human editors. Quality assessments aside, what you are about to read was also crafted by one of those.
And what you’re about to read from this human is the rationale behind my declaring, in advance, combination as the drug delivery industry’s Word of the Year for 2026. And, if I’m correct in my prognostication, well beyond a mere year.
The Percolating Presence Of Combinations In Delivery Development
Of course, the term combination has been in circulation and more than merely peripheral in the biopharma industry for at least a decade, arguably much longer than that. Among the demonstrations of just how thunderously obvious that acknowledgement could seem to be is the well-established presence of an Office of Combination Products at FDA.
Yet, in terms of permeation or embeddedness still to be gained, what I’m seeing is something like what I saw, as a rock music afficionado, in the early 1990s. At least 15 years prior, a raw, aggressive, status quo-challenging musical style that had itself built upon the legacy of earlier influences began to be labeled with the term punk rock. For the next decade or so, “punk” remained a mostly niche phenomenon, embraced primarily and with “true believer” zeal by its core practitioners and listeners. While known and perhaps even referred to more broadly, its reach and impact were relatively limited.
Then, especially with the emergence of a band called Nirvana and its surprisingly massive, breakthrough hit album Nevermind, the sound and concept became so part of the culture at large that a documentary film featuring that band and others similarly operating in the shadows of musical undergrounds was released under the moment-defining title, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. (For the record — pun intended! — Nirvana subsequently became more associated, not with punk, but rather with a rock subgenre it helped spawn: grunge.)
The Popularizing Appeal Of Combinations In Delivery Development
What we’re talking about is, of course, “mainstreaming” — the point at which a trajectory of aspiration takes on the momentum of ascendancy. In that way, my Word of the Year for 2026 reflects my monitoring of biopharma industry signals that suggest a parallel kind of rise and expansion.
In this case, it is of the concept of combination accelerating toward a position of centrality in product development. I am envisioning a not-so-distant scenario in which addressing combinatory aspects of the work at hand becomes so unavoidable as to ultimately make doing so a second nature act in the design, planning, and execution of new biopharma products.
So, just what is it that has me convinced that 2026 will be the year in which it will finally become nearly impossible, if not actually impossible, to talk about drug or biologics delivery without using the word combination? Foremost among the reasons is that my industry observations and conversations in 2025, especially as we moved into the latter half of the year, had me hearing regulatory references to it as an increasingly loud indicator.
In that sense, I am again recalling the transition in popular music from fall 1991 into the first half of 1992. That’s the stretch of months when the sounds of the Nirvana single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” went from being heard mainly on college radio stations to being heard on escalators in shopping malls. (Anyone remember those? Malls, I mean.) How did that expansion into omnipresence come to be?
Well, in addition to the undeniable force of the music, it took validation by those with power and authority to endorse and promote it for broader cultural awareness and consumption. In the case of Nirvana and “punk” rock, that meant adoption and airplay by powerful, corporate (i.e., mainstream) radio stations and, perhaps even more impactfully, by then cable TV powerhouse, MTV (Music Television, for those in need of a history lesson or memory refresher).
In the case of combination, as in “combination products,” “combination therapies,” and in adjacent combinatory concepts such as “connected devices” and “companion diagnostics,” the power and authority analogous to corporate rock radio in the early 1990s are regulatory agencies. In this analogy, FDA is akin to, say, KROQ radio in Los Angeles, if not MTV in a more global influence sense.
Onward To Omnipresence For Combinations In Delivery Development
While I haven’t filmed a documentary called 2025: The Year Combination Broke, I did, late in that year, shape and host a Drug Delivery Leader Live online event entitled, Eying The Drug Delivery Regulatory Landscape: The 'Must See' Watch List For 2026. It was at that event that clear “breakthrough” signals coursing throughout the year were further confirmed.
For that conversation, I was grateful to be joined by three panelists with extensive experience in the following: drug delivery, generally; combination products, specifically; and related regulatory pathways. Two were former FDA: Rumi Young, Director of Regulatory Policy at Novo Nordisk, and John “Barr” Weiner, who has followed his recent retirement from FDA by operating his own regulatory consulting practice. The third was Fran DeGrazio, who similarly heads up her own drug delivery consultancy and serves as a senior industry and technical advisor for Drug Delivery Leader after a long tenure at a large, industry services provider.
We discussed drug delivery trends and movements from 2025 that we will intently follow in 2026 and beyond. Rumi Young pointed to a notable upswing in FDA’s overt recognition of the role of combination products in the treatment landscape. That movement appeared in the context of the FDA Commissioner's National Priority Voucher (CNPV) Pilot Program, announced in June 2025. According to the agency press release, among the goals in support of the program’s tagline, Accelerated Drug Review for Companies Supporting U.S. National Interests, are “delivering more innovative cures” and “addressing unmet public health needs.”
For Young, of particular importance in the early rollout of the program was the addition of combination products to the therapeutic callouts. “When the program was first announced, it specifically scoped out combination products. That was very surprising to me,” Young explained. “What was then not surprising is — fast-forward a few months to the first round of picks for this special pilot program — combination products were included as part of the applicants, and that scope-out was removed. I think that was an acknowledgement that combination products ultimately help combat chronic diseases.”
Following his recently completed tenure at FDA, which included a role as Associate Director of Policy in the Office of Combination Products, Barr Weiner agreed that these recent events suggest a much more central positioning of combination products in therapy development and delivery. And for him, that reorientation reflects not only increased regulatory agency recognition of combination products, but also the establishment of “combination” as a necessary competency for industry. “This is a bit of a moment for combination products, where it has often been viewed as a marginal topic — an important, but kind of ‘to the side’ question,” Weiner said. “Now we've got major companies with major pipelines that are critically dependent upon effective combination product development and usage and realizing that this is not just a sideline to them. If you're going to be a biologics company, you better understand combination products.”
Echoing Weiner on the development and delivery of biologics-based products, Fran DeGrazio offered, “The new standard is really becoming combination products, certainly for biologics. Not only from a regulatory standpoint but from an industry standpoint, there needs to be the recognition that it's not just solely around the drug product, but that entire combination product.”
Personalized And Personally Administered Treatments: A Compelling Combination
Almost by definition, popularization involves “taking it to the masses.” In healthcare, those masses are, of course, patients. And, increasingly, patients are a) being treated with personalized medicines, including right down to the individualized, genetic level; and b) having treatments of all types designed for self-administration. In those scenarios, combinations are innovation’s major facilitators: drugs with drugs, biologics with biologics, drugs with biologics, drugs and/or biologics with devices, delivery devices with connected monitoring and dosing devices, and so on. If you are a patient or caregiver these days, combination as a therapy or delivery concept is likely more than simply nearing; it’s in your neighborhood, if not in your home.
Finally, as I witness the convergence of industry and regulatory around the expanding role and influence of combination products and therapies in the public health arena, my mind admittedly wanders to another sort of arena. In this moment, I am recalling the moment, quite a while back, when I became aware that the opening track on the debut album by one of punk rock’s progenitors had astonishingly, many years later, become repurposed and popularized as a chant-along anthem for gathered throngs at sports stadiums across the U.S. and possibly other parts of the globe.
So, as I look forward to the continued mainstreaming of combination, my 2026 Word of the Year for drug delivery, I will shamelessly borrow the exhortatory call from that bold blast of sound by those musical revolutionaries, The Ramones: “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!”