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Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is in a tough spot as activist investor Starboard Value continues to call for a change in the company’s leadership. However, analysts are supportive of the embattled executive.
The group of like-named companies that include Novo Holdings and Novo Nordisk—the two tied to a multibillion-dollar buyout of Catalent currently under FTC review—ultimately send proceeds to the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations.
Massachusetts residents voted Tuesday against the Natural Psychedelic Substances Act, which would have seen some psychedelics, including psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine, legalized in the state.
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Merck and Eisai announce that KEYTRUDA® plus LENVIMA® is now reimbursed with clinical criteria and conditions under the British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland drug plans, for adult patients with advanced endometrial carcinoma that is not microsatellite instability high or mismatch repair deficient, who have disease progression following prior platinum-based systemic therapy, and are not candidates for curative surgery or radiation.
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The HHS secretary recently canceled $500 million worth of BARDA contracts around mRNA vaccine research. But the U.S. government has already spent billions on this work, which has saved millions of lives.
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The latest data showed 15.7% weight loss in patients with diabetes after 68 weeks. In December 2024, CagriSema returned another disappointing readout for Novo, eliciting weight-loss of 22.7% in patients without diabetes, below the pharma’s prior projection of 25%.
In the plaque psoriasis arena, Sotyktu is facing off against Amgen’s Otezla and is facing the threat of upcoming competition from Alumis’ investigational TYK2 inhibitor.
Late-stage data also showed that Johnson & Johnson’s icotrokinra was superior to Bristol Myers Squibb’s Sotyktu at clearing skin and easing symptom severity in patients with plaque psoriasis.
In September 2024, a readout from a separate trial of rocatinlimab elicited mixed reactions from analysts, who found the antibody’s efficacy in that study to be underwhelming.
While the job market is tough for life sciences professionals right now, it won’t always be. Employers must continue striving to create fulfilling work environments, as the market won’t always be in their favor, say biopharma execs.
While drug developers work to mitigate the side effects associated with GLP-1–based obesity drugs, recent studies reveal that myriad variables are causing patients to stop treatment.
As sales of its COVID vaccine plummet, Novavax is looking ahead toward other novel vaccines, brought to market with the help of the company’s pharma partners—something it opted not to do as the pandemic swept the globe in 2020.
The FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee recently voted to narrow the label for checkpoint inhibitors Keytruda and Opdivo in stomach and esophageal cancers based on PD-L1 expression levels—but the high unmet need in these patient populations should also be considered.
On the agenda for the FDA this month are two RNA-based treatments for rare diseases.
Marty Makary, likely FDA commissioner under President Trump, appeared before Congress this week as the agency he’s set to lead continues to be rocked by sweeping changes and about-faces.