Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
The FDA quietly stopped publishing drug rejection letters after an anonymous pharma company challenged the practice. Investors, clinicians, and small biotechs are losing a critical window into why drugs fail, and October's deadline could determine whether it ever comes back.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals is paying $10 billion (a 102% premium) to acquire Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, its largest deal ever, betting big on hormone disorder drugs it says could generate $5 billion in annual revenue. Analysts are split on whether the price is genius or excessive.
Zymeworks is spending $929 million to buy Theravance Biopharma, a company whose lead drug failed twice in late-stage trials. The real prize isn't the drug; it's a portfolio of royalty cash flows that reveals where biotech M&A is really headed.
Novo Nordisk just launched the world's first once-weekly insulin in a country with 100 million diabetics, and it's actually cheaper than the daily alternatives. India could be the ultimate test case for whether convenience can fix the global insulin adherence crisis.
Moderna launched a 4,000-person Phase 3 trial for its mRNA bird flu vaccine, and interim data already show 82.7% efficacy against H5N1. With avian flu infecting over 1,000 dairy herds and jumping into dozens of mammal species, this is pandemic prep before the pandemic.
Roche killed two Huntington's disease programs on the same day, ending a 13-year bet with Ionis that the right biomarkers would lead to the right treatment. They didn't. Here's what it means for patients running out of options.
Dr. Reddy's was supposed to flood the market with cheap semaglutide pens. Then an impurity showed up during scale-up, cutting its volume target in half and wiping $678 million off its market cap. The GLP-1 generic revolution just got a harsh lesson in peptide manufacturing reality.
An arbitration panel just ruled that Prime Medicine didn't violate its agreement with Beam Therapeutics by developing a rare disease therapy, clearing the way for Prime to enter the clinic. The ruling sends a sharp signal about how gene-editing IP disputes will be settled going forward.
For decades, CAR-T therapy has crashed and burned against solid tumors. Allogene's off-the-shelf ALLO-316 just posted durable remissions in advanced kidney cancer that are still going past 18 months, and Wall Street is paying attention.
Two of 2026's largest biotech venture rounds landed on back-to-back days: $400 million for AI drug designer Chai Discovery and $315 million for radiopharmaceutical developer AdvanCell. The $715 million blitz reveals exactly where smart money thinks the future of drug development is headed.
GSK walked away from a $2.2 billion neuroscience deal with Alector after both antibody drugs flopped in clinical trials. The $700 million already spent is gone, and the wreckage says a lot about why brain diseases remain pharma's hardest problem.
Europe just greenlit the world's first combined flu-COVID vaccine, and it's not just a convenience play. Moderna's mCOMBRIAX could reshape seasonal vaccination, plug a dangerous coverage gap in older adults, and throw the company a financial lifeline it desperately needs.
AstraZeneca just dropped $200 million upfront for a Chinese-made COPD drug you've probably never heard of, with up to $1.9 billion more on the table. The deal says as much about China's biotech boom as it does about the race to dominate respiratory medicine.
Gilead Sciences is paying up to $5 billion for Tubulis, a German ADC startup most people have never heard of. The deal signals that big pharma's antibody-drug conjugate arms race just entered a new, much more expensive phase.
Merck KGaA is spending $11.3 billion in cash to acquire Bio-Techne, a company most people outside the lab have never heard of. The deal is the largest life sciences tools acquisition of 2026 and a bold bet that owning the picks and shovels of drug discovery is just as valuable as the drugs themselves.
Congress is investigating why Merck and AbbVie ran hundreds of clinical trials at Chinese military hospitals and in Xinjiang, raising national security and human rights concerns that could reshape how Big Pharma develops drugs globally.
For over two years, no gene-editing company dared to go public. Scribe Therapeutics just priced a $129 million IPO at the top of its range, with Sanofi buying in alongside public investors. The gene-editing IPO drought is officially over.
Two biotech startups claim they've grown human sperm from testicular stem cells and created early egg cells from a simple blood draw. If the science holds up, the future of human reproduction just got a radical rewrite.
Europe's drug regulator just recommended revoking Amgen's Tavneos after investigators found the clinical trial that got it approved was built on manipulated data. The case is a $3.7 billion cautionary tale with implications for every biotech acquirer, investor, and drug developer in the industry.
Otsuka's centanafadine just hit its FDA decision deadline, and the silence is deafening. The first triple-reuptake inhibitor for ADHD could reshape a $15 billion market, if the agency says yes.
Genentech cut 103 research scientists the same week it signed a $490 million breast cancer deal with Astex Pharmaceuticals. It's the starkest example yet of big pharma's new playbook: shrink internally, shop externally.
A tiny trial at Dana-Farber just showed that a single CAR-T infusion wiped out detectable disease in every patient with high-risk smoldering myeloma, and none have progressed to cancer. It's only 20 patients, but the implications are massive.
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