News

FEATURED STORIES
Early-stage financing rounds are on track to hit their lowest dollar value in years as funders continue to eschew risky investments, experts told BioSpace.
A mostly black box since emerging with more than a billion dollars in hand, Xaira Therapeutics is slowly pulling back the curtain, revealing plans to find partners and validate its pipeline.
IPO
After debuting on the public markets with $256.3 million and raking in an additional $472 million, Veradermics has emerged as one of biotech’s biggest post-IPO standouts. CEO Reid Waldman credits the weight loss craze for establishing consumer-driven channels.
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Congressional letters sent to the CEOs of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, BMS and AbbVie this week voicing concerns about the pharmas’ clinical trials in China highlight an ongoing discrepancy in how government and industry think about the rise of the Asian country’s biotech industry.
THE LATEST
In a collaboration agreement announced Wednesday, Boehringer Ingelheim will gain access to Ribo’s platform to target hepatocytes with investigational siRNA therapies for nonalcoholic or metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis.
Over the past year, obesity treatments have become the focus of intense media attention and discussion in healthcare — with increased focus on Wegovy and Zepbound. This attention has highlighted the need to address the global obesity epidemic.
FDA
The regulator greenlit 55 new drugs last year, seven of which belonged to Pfizer, including an ulcerative colitis treatment and a migraine nasal spray—both acquired in multibillion-dollar buys.
Patients treated with Longboard Pharmaceuticals’ bexicaserin saw a 32.5% drop in the frequency of countable motor seizures relative to placebo in a Phase 1b/IIa study. The company’s shares soared 316% Tuesday on the news.
The antibody-drug conjugate market remains hot so far in 2024 with Tuesday’s collaboration and license agreement between Roche and MediLink Therapeutics to develop a next-generation ADC in oncology.
The Swiss pharma is looking to leverage Voyager Therapeutics’ capsid technology for gene therapies aimed at treating Huntington’s disease and spinal muscular atrophy.
All three companies closed out the year, which saw significant growth in mergers and acquisitions, with high-value deals that could potentially set the tone for M&A in 2024.
Biopharmas of varying sizes—including larger companies like Amgen, Gilead and Pfizer—cut employees in 2023 to stay afloat.
Eli Lilly has signed a multi-year contract with animal genomics biotech Fauna Bio to use its artificial intelligence platform to discover drug targets for obesity in a deal worth nearly half a billion dollars.
Under the companies’ agreement, a previously disclosed option exercise fee of $75 million has been reduced to $10 million and the remaining pre-option development milestone has been removed.