Annalee Armstrong headshot

Annalee Armstrong

Senior Editor

Annalee Armstrong is an award-winning biopharma journalist covering the business of drug development. She began her career at small newspapers across Western Canada. During the assignment of a lifetime, the Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race, she met her husband in Alaska and eventually moved to the U.S. Since then, Annalee has covered energy, environmental regulations, healthcare and biopharma. Prior to BioSpace, Annalee was senior editor for Fierce Biotech, where she received several awards for her writing and editing. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband, two wild boys, an anxious Rhodesian Ridgeback and an indifferent tabby cat.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday, ahead of a vaccine advisory committee meeting later in September. Meanwhile, deal-making appetite appears healthy, and the weight loss space continues generating clinical data and other news.
IPO
Blank check deals dwindled after a crazy 2021. Now, biotechs are starting to turn to special purpose acquisition companies again as an easy route to the public markets.
IPO
After spinning out of BridgeBio in May 2024, BBOT had an eye on another round of fundraising in 2025. A SPAC quickly emerged as the best option.
Novartis is licensing ARO-SNCA, a preclinical siRNA therapy for synucleinopathies, a group of neurodegenerative disorders including Parkinson’s disease.
In another blow to Prothena’s neurodegenerative disease portfolio, anti-amyloid candidate PRX012 has run into the same problem that larger peers Biogen and Eli Lilly have battled: high rates of swelling in the brain.
BioSpace did a deep dive into biopharma female executives who navigated difficult markets to lead their companies to high-value exits.
Eli Lilly drops a second Phase III readout for orforglipron; AbbVie committed to the psychedelic therapeutics space with the $1.2 billion acquisition of Gilgamesh’s depression asset; the CDC taps vaccine skeptic Retsef Levi to lead its COVID-19 immunization working group; and the FDA prioritizes overall survival in cancer drug development.
As the political winds shift on a whim and public distrust of the pharma industry reaches fever pitch over drug pricing, executives are being asked to navigate an impassible path.
Generate:Biomedicines’ Nicole Clouse is one of the key legal minds trying to understand who owns what AI creates. The answers are critical to the future of biotech.
If the trend holds, IQVIA expects 2025 deal volume between Chinese and multinational companies to easily eclipse the 100 agreements signed in 2024.
Closely watched data from Eli Lilly and Viking Therapeutics this month have reignited the discussion around oral weight-loss drugs—and their ultimate place within the anti-obesity medication market.
IPO
LB Pharma will test the IPO market to seek funding for a Phase III-ready schizophrenia asset.
The deal extends AbbVie’s commitment to the psychedelics space and depression, after emraclidine’s high-profile flop in schizophrenia last November.
While it’s impossible to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the many obesity candidates with so many differences across clinical trials, we at BioSpace are giving it our best shot.
There’s still much more to come from the White House on tariffs, but the European Union has now reached a trade agreement with the U.S.