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The Nobel Laureate's CRISPR Company Called It Quits
Caribou Biosciences, the company built on Jennifer Doudna's Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR technology, is discontinuing all clinical development and slashing its workforce. The stock cratered roughly 40% after hours, with RBC cutting its price target to $1. Caribou still had $113.8 million in cash, so this wasn't about running on fumes. It was about investors losing faith that off-the-shelf cell therapy (donor-derived CAR-T cells that could sit on a shelf like aspirin) can overcome the body's stubborn tendency to reject foreign cells before they fight cancer.
Why it matters: Caribou's collapse isn't just one company's failure; it's a signal flare for the entire allogeneic CAR-T field. No off-the-shelf cell therapy has achieved widespread regulatory approval, and every remaining player's next fundraise just got harder.
Read more →Clinical Trials and Regulatory
Lilly Built a Drug Designed to Make Its Own Blockbuster Look Slow
Eli Lilly's experimental obesity combo EloraTZP beat its own blockbuster Zepbound in a head-to-head trial: 23.3% body weight loss versus 14.8% over 48 weeks. The new drug adds an amylin-mimicking ingredient on top of Zepbound's existing formula. It's only Phase 2 data (late-stage trials won't start until Q4 2026), but Lilly is sending a clear message to Novo Nordisk: the ceiling on weight loss keeps rising, and we plan to own it.
Read more →ArriVent's Lung Cancer Drug Missed Its Endpoint by a Razor-Thin Margin
ArriVent's stock lost more than half its value in a single session after its flagship lung cancer drug, firmonertinib, failed its Phase 3 trial. The drug kept cancer from progressing for 11.0 months versus 9.5 for chemo, but the p-value landed at 0.0654, just above the 0.05 threshold needed to count. With J&J's Rybrevant already approved in the same niche, ArriVent's path forward looks nearly impossible.
Read more →Sarepta Slaps a Black Box Warning on Its Gene Therapy While Cutting 500 Jobs
Sarepta added the FDA's most serious safety warning to Elevidys, its Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene therapy, citing fatal liver failure cases. Revenue has cratered roughly 71% from its Q4 2024 peak. The company is simultaneously cutting 500 jobs to save $400 million annually, pivoting R&D toward siRNA technology. It's a rough inflection point for AAV gene therapies broadly, where liver toxicity keeps emerging as a recurring problem.
Read more →Deals, Pricing, and Strategy
A Single Dose of This New Gene Therapy Costs More Than Most Houses
Ultragenyx priced Fayuvi at $3.95 million per patient, making it the second most expensive drug in the world. It's a one-time gene therapy for Sanfilippo syndrome, a fatal childhood brain disease with zero other approved treatments. Analysts are split: William Blair sees $325 million in peak sales, while Morgan Stanley holds at a cautious $20 price target, questioning whether families can actually navigate the insurance gauntlet at that price.
Read more →Boehringer Hands Its Rare Skin Drug to LEO Pharma for €90 Million
Boehringer Ingelheim licensed SPEVIGO, its first-in-class IL-36 blocker for generalized pustular psoriasis, to LEO Pharma in a deal worth €90 million upfront plus milestones. Boehringer is narrowing its focus to broader immunology, while LEO is building the deepest dermatology pipeline in pharma. With no real competitor to spesolimab on the horizon, LEO gets time to expand the drug into new skin conditions.
Read more →AstraZeneca Drops $1 Billion on 18 Floors in Cambridge's Kendall Square
AstraZeneca opened a 570,000-square-foot, 18-story R&D center that will house nearly 2,000 scientists working on oncology, rare diseases, and metabolic disorders. The building is part of a $50 billion U.S. investment plan through 2030. Kendall Square's biotech density keeps growing: Biogen, Takeda, and MIT are all building nearby.
Read more →Science, Funding, and AI
The Nobel Prize That Explains Why Half Your Medications Only Work One Way
Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for figuring out how to make chemical reactions produce only one mirror-image version of a molecule. More than half of all drugs are chiral (they exist in left-handed and right-handed forms), and giving patients the wrong version can range from useless to dangerous. Their work underpins modern selective synthesis across the pharma industry.
Read more →Lilly's Favorite Dinosaur-Named Biotech Just Priced a $125 Million IPO
TRex Bio proposed an IPO price range of $14 to $16 per share, aiming to raise roughly $125 million. Eli Lilly owns nearly 24% of the company and already has one of TRex's immune-regulation programs heading toward Phase 2a in lupus. The autoimmune startup's approach (activating the immune system's own peacekeepers, called regulatory T cells) could sidestep the blunt immunosuppression that defines most current treatments.
Read more →CSL Plugs Its Entire Drug Pipeline Into Amazon's Cloud
Australian biotech giant CSL partnered with AWS to deploy AI and cloud computing across its research and clinical development operation. It's not a pilot project; the company is migrating over 5,000 servers and 1,000 applications. CSL joins Merck and Novo Nordisk in the growing pharma cloud arms race, where 19 of the top 20 global drugmakers already use AWS.
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