Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
The White House wants to cut $15.8 billion from HHS, including a $5 billion hit to NIH. Congress has killed proposals like this before, but the uncertainty alone is already doing damage to America's biotech pipeline.
For three decades, the global drug pipeline only grew. Now it's shrunk for the first time since the mid-1990s, dropping nearly 1,000 programs. The forces behind the reversal tell a bigger story about where biotech is headed.
A Beijing-based biotech just raised $250 million in six months without a single drug in human testing. Syneron Bio's AI-powered peptide platform has AstraZeneca, sovereign wealth funds, and top VCs all placing big bets on molecules that could hit 'undruggable' targets.
Beam Therapeutics' base-editing therapy for sickle cell disease just landed in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the results are turning heads: 31 patients treated, zero severe pain crises, and fetal hemoglobin levels that rival healthy carriers. This isn't just a win for one company; it's a credibility moment for a whole new class of gene editing.
The FDA approved Eli Lilly's Foundayo, an oral obesity pill you can take any time without food restrictions, at just $25/month with insurance. It's cheaper, easier, and could reshape the entire GLP-1 market that Novo Nordisk has dominated.
Biogen's Spinraza was losing ground to Zolgensma and Evrysdi in the SMA market. Then the FDA approved a high-dose version that works significantly better, and it could reshape how the industry thinks about dose optimization for genetic medicines.
The UK just became the only country with tariff-free pharmaceutical access to the U.S. market, dodging 100% duties that everyone else still faces. The price? A 25% hike in what the NHS pays for new drugs, and a template that could reshape global pharma negotiations.
The Trump administration just dropped 100% tariffs on patented drug imports, the most aggressive pharma trade action in modern history. The real story isn't the tariff itself; it's the coordinated strategy pairing trade policy with FDA overhauls to fundamentally rewire how America makes and approves its medicines.
A BAP1 gene mutation guarantees cancer but makes tumors less aggressive, confounding researchers for years. Now a two-drug combination has exploited that contradiction to shrink tumors across four cancer types in mice, and both drugs already have human safety data.
Alto Neuroscience killed its brain patch drug for schizophrenia after a Phase 2 miss that came down to a statistical photo finish. The company is pivoting to depression, but the failure spotlights why cracking cognitive symptoms in psychiatry remains one of biotech's hardest puzzles.
Merck just signed a deal worth up to $838 million with Infinimmune, a four-year-old startup that mines the human immune system for antibodies using AI. It's the latest sign that Big Pharma's antibody shopping spree is far from over.
Gilead pulled the plug on its weekly HIV pill trial after an FDA safety hold lasted nearly a year without resolution. The company's HIV empire isn't crumbling, but its "dosing optionality" strategy just lost a key option.
The FDA pushed Orca Bio's decision on Orca-T back three months to July 2026, citing a manufacturing paperwork update. With Phase 3 data showing a massive survival advantage over standard transplants, the delay adds Orca Bio to a growing list of biotech companies caught in regulatory limbo.
A $6 million biotech shell just became a $380 million Alzheimer's play through a reverse merger, and Cyclerion's stock surged 350% on the news. Korsana Biosciences is betting its brain-penetrating antibody can outperform Leqembi and Kisunla, but it hasn't even started human testing yet.
Nearly 8,000 clinical trial sites across the Middle East have been knocked offline by the escalating conflict, threatening thousands of active studies and the patients enrolled in them. The fallout could delay drug approvals worldwide, and every major pharma company is exposed.
A Boulder, Colorado biotech you've never heard of just raised $100 million without testing its drug in a single person. Ambrosia Biosciences is betting its oral GLP-1 pill can compete in the most crowded race in pharma, and investors are lining up to fund that bet.
United Therapeutics' lung drug Tyvaso just posted blockbuster results in a disease it was never originally designed to treat. The IPF data could double the drug's market, and Wall Street is already doing the math.
Immunovant's FcRn inhibitor batoclimab just struck out in two Phase 3 trials for thyroid eye disease, sending shares tumbling and raising hard questions about whether this entire drug class can crack TED. The company is betting its future on a next-gen molecule, but the clock is ticking.
U.S. venture capital firms are embedding in Chinese labs and writing checks before research data is even published. The strategy has produced billion-dollar exits, but the geopolitical risks are as big as the potential rewards.
The first-ever tRNA therapy just entered the clinic, and it doesn't care what disease you have. Alltrna's AP003 could become the foundation of a disease-agnostic genetic medicine platform, but the road from first-in-human trial to approved drug is anything but simple.
Eli Lilly is spending up to $7.8 billion to acquire Centessa Pharmaceuticals and its pipeline of sleep-disorder drugs. It's Lilly's third acquisition of 2026, and it signals that the race to dominate neuroscience is getting very expensive, very fast.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya quoted the father of American science funding at CPAC to defend the Trump administration's research overhaul. Scientists say he got the history exactly backward, and the real-world numbers back them up.
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