News

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.
FEATURED STORIES
Last month, the FDA launched TrialBlazer, intended to streamline the IND path and bring early clinical trials and medical innovation home to the U.S. It’s a start, but new agency leadership must see it through.
FDA
Significant leadership instability at the FDA—compounded by continued workforce attrition—led to a slight slowdown in overall regulatory productivity in the first half of this year, but the agency has been catching up of late.
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.
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Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
If cell and gene therapy makers are going to achieve their mission to improve patients’ lives, the industry must come together to share information across stakeholders, from regulators to manufacturers to payers.
THE LATEST
The Nimble acquisition, which follows the $1.4 billion buy of Aliada Therapeutics in October, will help AbbVie rebuild and cement its long-term growth prospects following the Phase II failure of emraclidine in schizophrenia and in anticipation of market erosion for Skyrizi and Rinvoq, according to Guggenheim Partners analysts.
Now that they’ve received the go-signal from both U.S. and EU anti-trust regulators, Novo Holdings and Catalent expect to wrap up their deal in the coming days.
Even as Biogen and Eisai’s Leqembi and Eli Lilly’s Kisunla slowly roll out onto the market, experts question the efficacy of these anti-amyloid antibodies and the amyloid hypothesis overall.
Novartis, Biogen, Takeda and Novo Nordisk are all betting on advances in the molecular glue degraders space, collectively investing billions in hopes of treating cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiometabolic disease and more.
Some 90% of investigational drugs fail—and success rates are even more dire in the neuro space. Here, BioSpace looks at five clinical trial flops that stole headlines over the past 12 months.
Blackstone and Bain Capital are said to be among the final bidders for the Japanese company’s Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, sources told Reuters Friday.
RSV
Following news of RSV lower respiratory tract infections in infants immunized with Moderna’s investigational RNA vaccines, FDA advisors said the trial investigators should continue the study, while keeping an eye out for further safety signals.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review flagged five drugs whose prices were raised in 2023 with no evidence to support it. Meanwhile, the makers of these drugs have been reporting double-digit sales growth for many of these products.
Incyte is abandoning its ALK2 blocker zilurgisertib, which it was trialing for myelofibrosis-associated anemia, while iTeos will deprioritize the development of inupadenant after it failed to meet the biotech’s clinical bar in a Phase II study of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.
Ocaliva recently failed to secure the FDA’s traditional approval for primary biliary cholangitis due to safety concerns.