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With five CDER leaders in one year and regulatory proposals coming “by fiat,” the FDA is only making it more difficult to bring therapies to patients.
FEATURED STORIES
As the FDA unveils a parade of initiatives aimed at accelerating drug development for rare diseases, experts appeal for a consistent approval process that will support and further catalyze momentum.
The R&D pipeline for depression therapies faced a demoralizing 2025 as five high-profile candidates, including KOR antagonists by Johnson & Johnson and Neumora Therapeutics, flunked late-stage clinical trials, underscoring the persistent challenges of CNS drug development.
Innovative outcome measures coupled with a focus on patient-centered clinical differentiation can help the biopharma industry make meaningful progress in the highly complex area of neuroscience.
Job Trends
WARN notices provide a heads up that staff will soon be unemployed, but the act that mandates them has some nuances. An attorney explains how the law works, common misconceptions about it and how it helps those about to lose their jobs.
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Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
Like they say about the weather in Iceland, if you don’t like an action taken by the new administration, wait five minutes; it’ll probably change. The markets, it seems, don’t react kindly to that kind of policymaking.
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TERN-701 more than doubled the response rate of Novartis’ rival approved therapy in an early-stage trial, sending the biotech’s shares flying.
Pfizer apparently had more in the tank after the high-profile battle to acquire Metsera earlier this fall. The company has licensed a new GLP-1 from YaoPharma.
For traditional approval, CAR T therapies will need to establish superiority over current standard treatments, including already-approved CAR T products.
At the heart of the deal is Relation’s Lab-in-the-Loop platform, which uses AI models to improve understanding of diseases and guide clinical development programs.
Structure’s aleniglipron elicited over 11% weight loss in a Phase II trial, sending the biotech’s stock up nearly 103% as markets closed on Monday.
A mid-stage study for ABI-5366 will begin mid next year, while Assembly continues to assess the Phase II potential of ABI-1179.
The status could support staged transitions to new manufacturing processes, potentially mitigating some risks of high-stakes switches.
What China is accomplishing in R&D “has implications for everyone playing in the R&D or innovation world,” McKinsey’s Fangning Zhang says.
The agency’s sweeping rollout and staff challenge underscore rising momentum behind agentic AI: advanced, multiagent systems now fueling early pilots in medical writing, patient engagement and regulatory workflows across the industry.
Although still in Phase I, Wave Life Sciences’ injectable RNA weight loss treatment achieved results that impressed analysts, with 4% fat reduction after three months, beating Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide at a similar time point.