News
In this episode of Denatured, BioSpace editorial team members, Senior Editor, Annalee Armstrong, and News Editor, Dan Samorodnitsky, discuss their post-JPM takeaways and 2026 forecasts after speaking to a range of pharma and biotech executives and investors last week.
FEATURED STORIES
As drug candidates discovered via AI move into later-stage clinical trials, the technology seems to be doing as promised: speeding drug development.
Biohaven has suffered a few setbacks in recent months, including an FDA rejection and a missed $150 million benchmark payment, but CEO Vlad Coric looked for the brighter side at JPM, specifically emphasizing a serendipitous discovery that could get the company in the obesity game.
Henry Gosebruch, who has $3.5 billion in capital to deploy, is thinking broad as he steers the decades-old biotech out of years of turmoil.
FROM OUR EDITORS
Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
It doesn’t matter how many times you have traversed Union Square; no one knows which way is north, or where The Westin is in relation to the Ritz Carlton. A Verizon outage brought that into focus on Wednesday.
THE LATEST
Following FDA rejections, Regeneron and Scholar Rock are turning to other facilities to clear regulatory logjams created by quality problems at an ex-Catalent facility in Indiana. Novo Nordisk, meanwhile, has been tight-lipped about whether its own FDA applications have been affected.
U.K.-based pharmas will not face tariffs as long as Donald Trump is president, according to the agreement.
Following Novo Nordisk’s price cuts for its own GLP-1 medicines, Eli Lilly is offering discounts for the obesity drug purchased through LillyDirect. Both pharmas recently struck a deal with the White House for cheaper prices via the yet-to-be-launched TrumpRx.
Protego Biopharma is advancing a small-molecule drug that helps light chain proteins fold correctly, in turn addressing the underlying biological cause of AL amyloidosis.
The centerpiece of the deal is the in vivo editor TSRA-196, which in preclinical studies has shown robust editing at SERPINA1, the locus linked to alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.
The alleged deaths were detected by the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, reports from which “generally cannot be used to determine” causation or even contribution, according to the agency.
If approved, Ascendis’ TransCon CNP would become the second therapy for achondroplasia, challenging BioMarin’s Voxzogo.
As bispecifics, ADCs, protein degraders, and AI-designed mini-proteins move into the clinic, discovery teams face a new bottleneck: engineering and producing molecules whose complexity challenges conventional workflows.
As big pharmas including Takeda and Novo Nordisk flee the cell therapy space and smaller biotechs shutter their operations, these players are sticking around to take the modality as far as it can go.
The FDA’s docket in December includes decisions for two big biologic franchises: BMS’s Breyanzi and Amgen’s Uplizna.