Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
Trump's 100% drug tariffs came with plenty of escape hatches for Big Pharma. Small biotechs got a maze of unclear exemptions and no map. The innovation gap is about to get a lot wider.
ByteDance just spun out its secret five-year drug discovery project into a $1.5 billion AI biotech company called Anew Labs. The TikTok parent raised $290 million and is betting its algorithm expertise can crack medicine's hardest problems.
The FDA flagged four patient deaths in Newron's evenamide program and kept its clinical hold in place, casting a shadow over one of the few schizophrenia drugs that doesn't work through dopamine. With a critical data readout looming in early 2027, the fate of a first-in-class glutamate modulator hangs in the balance.
The FDA just approved Tecentriq for early-stage colon cancer after surgery, making it the first checkpoint inhibitor to land an adjuvant colorectal label. Genentech's ATOMIC trial cut recurrence risk in half for a specific group of patients, and the competitive implications are significant.
Roche signed a deal worth up to $1 billion with Defand Therapeutics, a two-year-old Chinese startup with zero clinical trials, to discover molecular glue cancer drugs. It's Roche's fourth China partnership since August, and it signals a radical shift in how big pharma thinks about drug discovery.
Viatris, one of the world's biggest generics companies, is paying $1.65 billion in cash for Pacira BioSciences and its non-opioid pain portfolio. The deal says as much about the future of generics as it does about pain management.
In a disease where the best drugs only slow the scarring, Endeavor BioMedicines just dropped Phase 2b data suggesting its Hedgehog pathway inhibitor might actually reverse lung fibrosis. If it holds up, the IPF treatment playbook gets rewritten.
The FDA just approved tucatinib as the first oral targeted pill added to maintenance therapy for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, buying patients nearly nine extra months of disease control. For Pfizer, it's a crucial test of whether the $43 billion Seagen deal can deliver beyond the headline drugs.
A Dutch court just blocked Merck from selling subcutaneous Keytruda in eight European countries, throwing a wrench into the lifecycle strategy for the world's best-selling drug. Halozyme, the small San Diego company behind the patent fight, is proving it can go toe-to-toe with a pharma giant.
Caribou Biosciences, the CRISPR company co-founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, is shutting down after failing to raise the cash needed to advance its cancer therapies. The closure is the latest domino to fall in a brutal stretch for gene-editing biotechs, where great science keeps colliding with harsh economics.
Editas Medicine just got the green light to test a one-shot CRISPR therapy that could replace daily cholesterol pills forever. The primate data showed 90%+ LDL reduction from a single dose, and now it's heading into humans.
Celiac disease affects millions of people worldwide, and the only treatment is a strict gluten-free diet. Argenx just posted positive Phase 2 data for what could become the first-ever approved drug for the condition, and the company is charging toward a pivotal trial.
PhRMA just filed a major lawsuit to block the Trump administration's GLOBE rule, which would tie Medicare drug prices to what other countries pay. The pharmaceutical industry's biggest trade group is betting it found a legal argument that actually works, after years of courtroom losses.
MIT researchers used AI to engineer mRNA vaccine packaging that survives a full year at room temperature, and mice showed the same immune response as with fresh, frozen doses. If this holds up in humans, it could slash cold-chain costs by 86% and rewrite the rules of global vaccine distribution.
Zymeworks dropped $929 million to acquire Theravance Biopharma, and the deal transforms it from a clinical-stage antibody shop into a diversified cash-flow machine. The financing structure is unusually clever, and Wall Street is paying attention.
Telix Pharmaceuticals is spending up to $2.35 billion to acquire ITM Isotope Technologies, and the real story isn't the pipeline. It's a high-stakes bet on controlling the fragile supply chain that the entire radiopharmaceutical industry depends on.
Cerevance, a company literally born from Takeda's corporate restructuring, just posted a Phase 3 win in Parkinson's disease. The drug gave patients back 37 minutes of normalcy per day, and in a field starved for progress, that matters more than you'd think.
CSL just plugged its entire drug development operation into Amazon's cloud. It's not alone: the biggest pharma companies on the planet are racing to lock in hyperscale AI partners, and the deals keep getting bigger.
AstraZeneca just opened an 18-story, 570,000-square-foot R&D center in Cambridge's Kendall Square, betting $1 billion that the world's densest biotech cluster is the best place to cure cancer. It's the biggest single move in a pharma land grab that's reshaping an entire zip code.
ArriVent's lead lung cancer drug missed its Phase 3 endpoint by a razor-thin margin, and investors erased more than half the company's value in a single day. The failure is the latest cautionary tale about betting everything on one clinical readout.
Caribou Biosciences, the CRISPR company co-founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, is shutting down its cancer therapy programs and exploring a sale. Its collapse signals a broader reckoning for the entire off-the-shelf cell therapy field.
TRex Bio just priced a $125 million IPO with Eli Lilly owning nearly a quarter of the company. The autoimmune biotech's approach to immune regulation (and Lilly's unusually deep involvement) tells a bigger story about how big pharma is placing its bets.
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