News

Novo Nordisk reported a loss in a head-to-head trial of CagriSema against Lilly’s Zepbound earlier this week. This time around, Lilly’s orforglipron bested Novo’s oral Wegovy in blood sugar control and weight reduction—albeit with a few extra discontinuations as compared to its rival.
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Alternatives to opioids are desperately needed to better treat moderate to severe acute pain, but to date, we’ve seen few novel analgesics hit the market.
IPO
LB Pharma needed $350 million to advance a promising schizophrenia candidate at a time when the biotech markets were locked up tight. Fortunately, it wasn’t CEO Heather Turner’s first rodeo.
Rare disease drug developers struggle to survive in a biopharma investment market that prioritizes large patient populations. Initiatives like the Orphan Therapeutics Accelerator are attempting to solve what CEO Craig Martin says is not a science problem, but a math problem.
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Eli Lilly’s win in a head-to-head trial drove Novo Nordisk’s market cap to pre-Wegovy levels not long after the victor became the first pharma company to top a $1 trillion valuation. It seems one company can do no right, while the other can do no wrong.
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The Biotech Ecosystem Venture Fund will combine the sourcing capabilities of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Eli Lilly’s expertise in R&D—plus half a billion in capital from the Big Pharma.
Research has shown remnant cholesterol is a significant factor in cardiovascular disease risk.
If approved, Pfizer’s sasanlimab will distinguish itself from Merck’s blockbuster Keytruda as the first PD-1 inhibitor indicated in combination with BCG for high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer patients who had not previously undergone BCG treatment.
Concurrently, a preprint from the industry-backed Vital Transformation found a 50% drop in company investments into small-molecule drug development.
Eli Lilly’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis deal with Mediar is centered around MTX-463, an anti-WISP1 antibody that early studies have found to be safe and capable of engaging its target.
On Thursday, Boehringer Ingelheim announced a partnership with Synaffix to advance antibody-drug conjugates and exercised its fourth license option under a 2013 collaboration with Oxford BioTherapeutics.
Ouro is planning to leverage T cell engagers to deplete B cells and “reset” the immune system to treat immune-mediated diseases.
ALS
Misses from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis hopefuls Denali Therapeutics and partners AbbVie and Calico Life Sciences mark the latest setbacks for the controversial platform trial, the results from which have largely mirrored the dismal success rate in ALS overall.
Initial rounds of VC financing totaled $7.7 billion over 137 deals for biopharma in 2024, compared to $3.8 billion over 156 deals in 2023.
MaaT013 in 2022 was put under clinical hold by the FDA, which cited safety and efficacy concerns with the sample-pooling method used to produce the investigational therapy. The hold was lifted in April 2023.