Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
ARPA-H just handed $160 million to seven teams tasked with turning custom gene editing from a $4 million luxury into a scalable platform. The targets: rare childhood diseases. The timeline: patients dosed within three years.
A nominee for the office that coordinates America's pandemic response has called mRNA vaccines "reckless" and promoted the debunked vaccines-autism link. Public health experts are sounding alarms, and vaccine makers are quietly rethinking their U.S. strategies.
The FDA is shutting down the booming market for cheap, compounded versions of Ozempic and Mounjaro. Billions in revenue are headed back to Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, but millions of patients could lose their most affordable option.
Eli Lilly is selling Zepbound in cheaper single-dose vials through its direct platform, dropping monthly costs to as low as $299. It's a direct counterpunch to Novo Nordisk's aggressive Wegovy discounting, and the GLP-1 price war is only getting started.
Novo Nordisk is offering Wegovy at nearly 30% off through Netflix-style subscription plans for cash-pay patients. It's a bold pricing play, but with Eli Lilly's Zepbound already dominating U.S. prescriptions, is it enough to turn the tide?
Ipsen just dropped up to €700 million on a Swiss biotech's antibody that targets a virus most people have never heard of. The catch: it's the only thing in development for a condition that wrecks transplanted kidneys, and the Phase II results are messy enough to make things interesting.
AstraZeneca and Ionis' gene-silencing drug eplontersen did everything right biologically in a massive ATTR cardiomyopathy trial, yet still failed to keep patients alive or out of the hospital. The reason why could reshape how the entire industry thinks about combination therapy.
Corcept Therapeutics just got FDA approval for the first drug that blocks cortisol from shielding tumors against chemotherapy. The approval came nearly four months early, and it could reshape treatment for the thousands of ovarian cancer patients who've run out of options.
Europe just approved the world's first combined flu-COVID vaccine, and it's not even close to what you'd expect. Moderna's single-shot mRNA combo could upend a $10 billion market, but the real battle is just getting started.
ARPA-H just dropped $160 million to turn one-of-a-kind gene therapies into repeatable platforms. Seven teams, seven disease areas, and a bold bet that personalized genetic cures can be mass-customized like everything else in modern life.
GSK's Hansoh-partnered ADC just delivered the first-ever Phase 3 survival win for a B7-H3-targeted drug in any cancer, and it happened in one of oncology's deadliest diseases. The numbers aren't out yet, but the signal is unmistakable.
The Trump administration is threatening 100% tariffs on imported brand-name drugs while simultaneously striking pricing deals with 16 pharma giants covering 86% of the branded market. The discounts look massive on paper, but the fine print tells a more complicated story.
Europe's drug safety watchdog flagged a small brain tumor risk linked to widely used progestin contraceptives containing desogestrel and etonogestrel. The finding could affect prescribing for millions of women and force label changes on products like Nexplanon.
The FDA rejected Elevar and Hengrui's liver cancer combo for the third time, and it has nothing to do with whether the drug works. The culprit is a manufacturing facility in China that keeps failing inspection, threatening a billion-dollar deal while competitors cement their grip on the market.
Germany's parliament just passed sweeping drug pricing reforms that squeeze pharma margins from every angle. The ripple effects could reshape how medicines are priced across all of Europe.
Bayer just pulled €3 billion from Apollo without giving up control of its blockbuster IUD franchise. It's a clever financial move, but the real story is why the German pharma giant needed the cash so badly in the first place.
The FDA approved a wearable on-body injector version of Sanofi's myeloma drug Sarclisa, making it the first cancer therapy in the U.S. delivered this way. It won't dethrone J&J's Darzalex overnight, but it just erased one of the biggest reasons doctors defaulted to the competition.
MeiraGTx scooped up a gene therapy J&J abandoned, then locked in $400 million in non-dilutive funding from Oberland Capital to bring it to market. The deal structure, the pipeline, and the risks tell a fascinating story about how gene therapies actually get financed.
Roche terminated both its Huntington's disease ASO programs in a single announcement, including its decade-long flagship partnership with Ionis. The double failure raises hard questions about whether the field's best strategy for tackling the disease actually works in humans.
The Trump administration just slapped a 100% tariff on imported brand-name drugs, the steepest Section 232 rate ever applied to a single product category. But the real story is in the escape hatches: cut your prices, build a factory in America, or pay double at the border.
Valneva pulled the world's only approved chikungunya vaccine from the U.S. after it was found to cause the very disease it was supposed to prevent. With the virus spreading northward and no replacement on American shelves, the withdrawal exposes a gaping hole in tropical disease preparedness.
Fate Therapeutics' off-the-shelf CAR-T therapy showed clean safety and improved symptoms in all four systemic sclerosis patients treated so far. It's the latest sign that cancer's most powerful weapon might have a second career in autoimmune disease.
Join thousands of biotech professionals who start their day with our free, daily briefing.