Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
Biogen is paying a 140% premium to acquire Apellis Pharmaceuticals in a $5.6 billion all-cash deal, its biggest acquisition in years. The move completes a three-year strategy to build a complement disease powerhouse, and it tells you everything about where big pharma thinks the future of immunology is headed.
Bicycle Therapeutics cut 30% of its staff and shelved its bladder cancer drug after the FDA demanded more proof it could beat Pfizer's Padcev. Now the company is betting its future on pancreatic cancer and radioactive missiles.
Takeda just axed 634 U.S. jobs, bringing its two-year layoff total to roughly 2,500. The company is spending nearly a billion dollars on restructuring to save $1.3 billion a year, but everything hinges on whether its next wave of drugs can replace the revenue that's already slipping away.
Blackstone just closed a $6.3 billion life sciences fund, the largest dedicated vehicle of its kind ever raised. In a market where biotech fundraising hit multi-year lows, the oversubscribed mega-fund tells a fascinating story about where institutional money is actually flowing.
Merck is spending $6.7 billion on a cancer drug that's still in early trials, and the logic behind it says everything about how desperate Big Pharma gets when a $30 billion product is about to lose patent protection.
Merck just showed that a daily pill can lower cholesterol as well as the injectable drugs patients keep quitting. With 97% adherence and a nearly 60% LDL reduction, enlicitide could upend the $3 billion PCSK9 inhibitor market.
For 20 years, kids with Hunter syndrome had a treatment that could help their bodies but couldn't reach their brains. Denali Therapeutics just got FDA approval for the first biologic designed to cross the blood-brain barrier, and the implications go way beyond one rare disease.
Astellas pulled the plug on its STING inhibitor trial for Sjögren's syndrome before it could even generate human data. The decision says as much about a notoriously undruggable target as it does about where Big Pharma is placing its bets.
Kailera Therapeutics raised nearly $1 billion in private funding before most people knew its name. Now the obesity-focused biotech is going public, and its IPO could reveal whether Wall Street's love affair with weight-loss drugs still has room to grow.
J&J's $16.6 billion bet on the Impella heart pump just hit a wall. Two major trials showed the world's most popular cardiac support device doesn't help (and might actually harm) patients in the procedures where it's used most often.
Eli Lilly just committed up to $2.75 billion to AI drug discovery company Insilico Medicine, making it one of the largest deals of its kind. The partnership has escalated from a quiet software license in 2023 to a full-scale R&D collaboration that could reshape how blockbuster drugs get made.
Kardigan's hypertension drug crushed its biomarker target but completely missed on blood pressure. The twist? A single dose worked so well it accidentally ruined the trial's control group, leaving everyone scratching their heads about what happens next.
Biogen's litifilimab just posted positive Phase 2 results in cutaneous lupus, a disease that hasn't seen a new targeted therapy in 70 years. The drug works by silencing the immune cells that drive lupus inflammation, and Phase 3 trials are already underway.
Scientists at a Chinese university made cancer-killing eye drops from pig semen exosomes, and they actually worked in mice. The research is bizarre, early, and surprisingly brilliant.
Wave Life Sciences' obesity drug showed a 14% drop in visceral fat and preserved muscle mass, but its body weight loss of less than 1% sent shares plummeting roughly 50% in a single day. In the GLP-1 era, the scale is the only scoreboard that matters.
The White House sent its most-favored-nation drug pricing bill to pharma companies for feedback before Congress even got a look. The legislation could reshape how every American pays for prescription drugs, but there's a catch hiding in the fine print.
Novocure just posted Phase 2 data showing its electric-field device crushed historical controls in metastatic pancreatic cancer, one of oncology's most hopeless battlegrounds. In a disease where almost nothing works, these numbers are turning heads.
The FDA just approved the first-ever weekly insulin, cutting injections from 365 to 52 per year. For millions of diabetes patients who forget, skip, or dread their daily shots, Novo Nordisk's Awiqli could be the biggest convenience leap in insulin's 100-year history.
Otsuka Pharmaceutical just dropped $1.225 billion on a company built around an MDMA analog for PTSD, the biggest pharma deal the psychedelics space has ever seen. Two years after the FDA rejected Lykos' MDMA therapy, Big Pharma is betting the comeback will look very different.
AstraZeneca's tozorakimab just nailed two Phase 3 trials in COPD, a disease that has been a graveyard for biologic drugs. The kicker? It worked across the board, not just in narrow patient subsets, potentially unlocking a $5 billion opportunity in a market everyone left for dead.
Vertex spent $4.9 billion on a kidney drug nobody was sure about. The Phase 3 results just came in, and they might justify every penny, with analysts projecting peak sales that could dwarf the acquisition price.
A masked antibody-drug conjugate from tiny CytomX Therapeutics just posted a 32% response rate in late-line colorectal cancer, a disease where low-single-digit responses are the norm. The stock went haywire, but the science behind it might be even more interesting.
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