Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
Helus Pharma's board fired its CEO just two months after hiring him, and they're not saying why. With Phase 3 data on a psychedelic-inspired depression treatment due later this year, the timing couldn't be worse.
Regeneron just landed its first-ever gene therapy approval, and it does something remarkable: restore hearing in children born deaf from a genetic mutation. One surgery, no cochlear implant required. Here's why it matters for a company that built its empire on antibodies.
Pfizer tapped NFL Draft prospect Fernando Mendoza as the face of its cancer screening campaign, and it's not just a feel-good play. Behind the football metaphors is a $43 billion oncology strategy that needs a bigger funnel.
Avalyn Pharma wants $200M+ to prove that two blockbuster lung drugs work better as a mist than a pill. Their IPO lands in a market that's suddenly hungry for exactly this kind of bet.
Regeneron was the 17th and final major drugmaker to cut a pricing deal with the White House's Most Favored Nation initiative. The agreement includes a 58% price cut on Praluent, a free gene therapy for rare childhood deafness, and nearly $10 billion in domestic manufacturing pledges. With 86% of the branded drug market now covered, the real question is what these deals actually mean for patients at the pharmacy counter.
Eli Lilly just killed a RIPK1 partnership with Rigel Pharmaceuticals that was worth up to $960 million. The move says less about Rigel and more about how ruthlessly Lilly is pruning everything that isn't a potential blockbuster.
Merck just signed a deal worth up to $1 billion with Google Cloud to embed AI across its entire operation, from drug discovery to manufacturing. It's one of the largest pharma-tech partnerships ever, and it signals that Big Pharma's AI arms race has entered a whole new weight class.
Revolution Medicines just dropped first-line pancreatic cancer data for daraxonrasib at AACR, and the numbers are turning heads. Building on Phase 3 results that nearly doubled survival, this KRAS-targeting drug is rewriting expectations in oncology's most unforgiving arena.
Sidewinder Therapeutics just raised $137 million without a single drug in human testing. Its secret weapon: bispecific ADCs that target cancer cells with two signals instead of one, like a bouncer checking two forms of ID. The investor list is stacked, but the real test is still years away.
A gene therapy trial just restored hearing in 90% of deaf patients, some within weeks of a single injection. The results are 'mind-boggling,' and pharma companies are spending billions to win the race.
Novartis killed two late-stage trials for its next-gen blood thinner after it couldn't outperform Eliquis, the $14.4 billion anticoagulant behemoth. The $925 million bet on abelacimab just got a lot narrower, and the implications ripple across the entire Factor XIa race.
Eli Lilly just paid up to $300 million for a three-year-old startup that hasn't tested a single drug in humans. CrossBridge Bio's dual-payload ADC technology is so hot that Lilly couldn't wait for clinical data, and the deal reveals just how frenzied the ADC arms race has become.
Ray Therapeutics just pulled in $125 million to develop a gene therapy that could restore vision in blind patients, regardless of which genetic mutation caused their disease. The FDA is already watching closely.
For 40 years, KRAS was cancer's most famous "undruggable" target. Revolution Medicines just posted data suggesting they've cracked one of its nastiest mutations, with tumor response rates that nearly triple what chemotherapy can do.
PBMs are telling the Trump administration that disclosing drug prices is illegal. Employers are begging for the data. With $10,000-per-day fines on the table and 136 million Americans caught in the middle, the ugliest fight in healthcare is just getting started.
Flagship Pioneering just launched Serif Biomedicines with $50M to develop "modified DNA" therapeutics, a new modality designed to combine mRNA's flexibility with gene therapy's staying power. It's an ambitious bet on solving genetic medicine's biggest trade-off.
Two former Sage Therapeutics leaders just launched a brain-focused biotech with $106 million and four clinical-stage drugs. In a therapeutic area where 85% of drugs fail, they're betting their track record (and two FDA approvals) can beat the odds.
Merck's islatravir nearly died after alarming safety signals forced the FDA to halt clinical trials. Now it's the backbone of Idvynso, the first two-drug HIV regimen that ditches the most popular drug class in the field. The comeback story is worth reading.
Gilead is walking away from key parts of its Arcus Biosciences partnership after yet another TIGIT drug failure, joining Roche, Merck, and GSK in what's becoming the most expensive graveyard in cancer research. The $2 billion collaboration is shrinking fast, and the entire checkpoint target may be a scientific dead end.
Eli Lilly is spending up to $7 billion on Kelonia Therapeutics and its technology for building cancer-fighting CAR-T cells directly inside patients' bodies. It's Lilly's second massive in vivo CAR-T acquisition in two months, and the pharma giant isn't the only one racing to rewrite how immunotherapy works.
The FDA rejected Replimune's cancer-fighting virus for the second time, and the fallout was swift: 63 employees gone, manufacturing scaled back, and a company fighting to survive. The oncolytic virus pioneer's collapse reveals what happens when elegant science meets unforgiving regulatory math.
Flagship Pioneering, the firm that built Moderna, just unveiled Serif Biomedicines and a brand-new drug category called Modified DNA. It promises the durability of gene therapy and the flexibility of mRNA, without rewriting your genome. The catch? It still has to prove it works in humans.
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