Original reporting and analysis on the stories shaping biotech.
Five biotech acquisitions in a single week totaling over $7.6 billion, capped by Chiesi's $1.9 billion grab of oral HAE therapy maker KalVista. The M&A wave signals something bigger about where big pharma's money is headed.
Ipsen paid $952 million for Albireo Pharma in 2023, then quietly shelved two of the pipeline candidates that came with the deal. The crown jewel is thriving, but the extras just hit the trash — and it's a pattern pharma keeps repeating.
Sanofi asked the FDA to pull its diabetes drug from the agency's brand-new fast-track review program after a political appointee allegedly overruled career scientists. The move raises uncomfortable questions about who's really making drug approval decisions.
Tempero Bio raised $70 million and had a genuinely novel approach to treating addiction. Then one serious adverse event in its Phase 2 trial brought the entire company down overnight. The silence around what went wrong might be the most troubling part.
Avalo Therapeutics just posted Phase 2 results in hidradenitis suppurativa that beat AbbVie's own candidate on absolute efficacy, sent shares soaring 45%, and raised $375 million overnight. Now the real question: who's going to buy them?
The FDA rejected a rare cancer cell therapy in January despite its own reviewers recommending approval. Three months later, with no new data, the agency says it will reconsider. What changed, and what does it mean for the future of rare disease drug approvals?
UCB just paid $2.2 billion for Candid Therapeutics, a biotech that launched from stealth barely 18 months ago. The deal reveals big pharma's frenzied bet that T-cell engagers could become the new standard of care for autoimmune diseases.
The FDA is letting Amgen and AstraZeneca stream clinical trial data to regulators in real time, ditching the decades-old "run the study, then submit everything" model. If it works, drug development timelines could compress by months, and the entire industry will want in.
A bipartisan bill would ban all nonhuman primate imports into the U.S., threatening the supply chain for preclinical drug testing. With 20,000+ monkeys imported annually for research, the legislation could force an industry-wide scramble toward alternative testing methods.
A London startup just raised $83 million to weaponize your body's most overlooked immune cells against cancer. Cytospire's "pan-gamma delta" approach bets that the quiet, tissue-dwelling T cells nobody talks about might outperform the famous ones that power today's immunotherapies.
China's new supply chain regulations took effect with zero warning, making it potentially illegal for Western pharma companies to diversify away from Chinese manufacturing. With China controlling 40-45% of global API production, the industry faces an impossible compliance puzzle between Washington and Beijing.
Bayer is paying up to $2.4 billion for a tiny eye implant that showed something unprecedented in trials: it actually reversed glaucoma damage instead of just slowing it down. The deal reveals how desperate big pharma is to escape the biosimilar squeeze.
CellCentric just raised $220 million (oversubscribed) for a single oral cancer drug that works through epigenetics, not immunotherapy. With investors like Fidelity and RA Capital fighting to get in, the Cambridge spin-out is betting it can crack multiple myeloma after everything else fails.
Novo Nordisk killed its simpler pen design for CagriSema but swears the launch timeline hasn't budged. In the middle of the fiercest obesity drug race in history, that tradeoff might be the smartest move they've made all year.
BioNTech is shuttering four manufacturing sites and cutting 1,860 jobs as it dismantles its COVID vaccine empire. The company is betting everything on becoming an oncology powerhouse by 2030, armed with €16.8 billion in cash and 15 Phase III cancer trials.
GSK just dropped $55 million (with up to $1 billion on the table) to license a Chinese biotech's RNA drug that targets belly fat while preserving muscle. It's the latest sign that the obesity drug race is about to get way more interesting than GLP-1s.
Madrigal Pharmaceuticals just paid up to $1 billion for a gene-silencing drug to pair with its blockbuster MASH therapy Rezdiffra. It's the third major deal in a year as the company races to build an unbeatable liver disease franchise before Novo Nordisk and others crash the party.
The FDA is letting Amgen and AstraZeneca share live clinical trial data with regulators as patients enroll, not after trials end. It could cut drug development timelines by 20-40%, and it's the biggest change to how trials work in six decades.
Gene therapy keeps failing Huntington's patients, and Latus Bio thinks it knows why: everyone's been using way too much drug. Their $97 million Series A is funding a radically different delivery approach that could change the math for brain diseases.
Cytokinetics just dropped new MYQORZO data at ACC that beat both placebo and metoprolol across every major measure in 371 HCM patients. With Camzyos' non-obstructive trial already failed, the second-mover might be building the better mousetrap.
Viridian's elegrobart just posted another Phase 3 win in thyroid eye disease, threatening Amgen's $1.9 billion Tepezza monopoly. The twist: it's a self-administered shot versus Tepezza's eight IV infusions, and the chronic TED data is right around the corner.
Passage Bio is cutting 75% of its workforce after the FDA demanded a randomized trial it can't afford to run. The gene therapy company's promising brain data wasn't enough to overcome the brutal economics of rare disease drug development.
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