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Replimune is axing 144 employees at its Woburn headquarters and 80 at its Framingham manufacturing site. The cuts follow the FDA’s second rejection of the biotech’s advanced melanoma candidate.
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Doubling survival in pancreatic cancer, a long-fought rare disease approval, a massive IPO and ambitious biotech entrepreneurs have BioSpace Senior Editor Annalee Armstrong feeling upbeat about the biotech scene.
After Replimune’s advanced melanoma drug was rejected for a second time, CEO Sushil Patel slammed the FDA for failing to exercise regulatory flexibility, while other experts bemoaned the agency’s lack of consistency. With new safety guidelines for gene editing therapies, the FDA has taken a first step toward fixing both problems.
The Merck update, which will shed light on a $588 million bet to succeed Keytruda, is part of a roster of presentations that could shape the future of ADCs, protein degraders and KRAS-targeted therapies.
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Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy has a few months’ head start on Eli Lilly’s newly approved pill. While the Indianapolis pharma has come from behind the Danish rival in the weight loss space before, last time it clearly had the better drug.
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The FDA granted Johnson & Johnson a Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher in December 2025 after the combination of Darzalex and Tecvayli improved progression-free survival by 83%. The new approval is for second-line treatment of the blood cancer.
UniQure does not have to drill placebo burr holes in the skulls of patients with Huntington’s disease, an unnamed FDA senior official said on Thursday. Instead, the company would anesthetize them and put “one to three nicks” in their scalp.
Psychedelics are a “game changer” in depression care, according to William Blair, but the complicated treatment regimens mean they will likely be supplanted by more-traditional options once they become available.
The alliance, which pairs Tenaya’s modality agnostic target identification and validation capabilities with Alnylam’s deep experience in RNA interference therapeutics, comes during a period of resurgence for the cardiovascular space.
UniQure’s Path for Huntington’s Gene Therapy Clouded by Ethical Questions as Potential Phase 3 Looms
While the FDA appears to be adamant that uniQure conduct a sham surgery–controlled Phase 3 trial before AMT-130 can be considered for approval, experts believe there is an alternate path forward for the therapy, perhaps even based on precedent from the recent drama surrounding Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine.
Adam Urato, who is currently a vaccine advisor to the CDC, is closely associated with acting CDER director Tracy Beth Høeg and is a fellow skeptic of the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors during pregnancy.
The timing of the partial hold is “odd,” according to analysts at Stifel, who noted that the preclinical data the FDA took issue with were filed in mid-2024.
South Korea has attracted increasing investment from the pharmaceutical industry, which is drawn to the Asian country due to its experience in antibody-drug conjugates and cell and gene therapies, according to McKinsey.
In this episode of Denatured, you’ll listen to Ram May-Ron, managing partner at FreeMind Group, and Ravi Kiron, managing director at Biopharma Strategy Advisors. We’ll be speaking about how to combine nondilutive funding and family office money into a unified strategy that gets companies through the drug development valley of death.
Over half of biopharma professionals would work again at the companies that let them go, according to a BioSpace LinkedIn poll. Several professionals, as well as recruiting and talent acquisition experts, discuss reasons for—and a key risk of—going back.