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The second half finished strong after two tumultuous years. What will 2026 bring for the biotech sector?
FDA
Policy initiatives have come fast and furious at the FDA this year. While guidances on rare diseases and vaccines have consumed most of the ink, policy shifts aimed at improving FDA efficiencies and reshoring U.S. manufacturing also got some attention. Here, BioSpace rounds up more than a dozen initiatives relevant to the biopharma industry.
After 27 years in business, Cytokinetics hopes to pit its own cardiac myosin inhibitor against one it initially developed—now owned by Bristol Myers Squibb—in a market worth billions. Aficamten has a PDUFA date of Dec. 26.
Job Trends
Follow along as BioSpace tracks job cuts and restructuring initiatives.
FROM OUR EDITORS
Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
With five CDER leaders in one year and regulatory proposals coming “by fiat,” the FDA is only making it more difficult to bring therapies to patients.
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Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which founded Lykos, bemoaned a “moving of the goal posts” in Lykos’ rejection but looked for positives in the newly released complete response letter.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeated a series of anti-vaccine talking points during his appearance in front of the Senate finance committee on Thursday, as Democratic and Republican senators alike hammered the Health Secretary on recent COVID-19 vaccine restrictions and his views on Operation Warp Speed.
Ousted CDC Director Susan Monarez claimed in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal Thursday that she was fired for refusing to rubber-stamp COVID-19 recommendations to be made by an advisory panel that has expressed “antivaccine rhetoric.”
Despite hitting its efficacy targets in the Phase III COAST-1 study, Sanofi’s amlitelimab remains “meaningfully inferior” to Dupixent, according to analysts at Leerink Partners.
Hengrui Pharmaceuticals has been busy this year, signing a nearly $2 billion cardio contract with Merck in March and a 12-asset agreement with GSK in July worth up to $12 billion.
HIV
In coordination with the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Gilead will make its twice-yearly HIV prophylactic Yeztugo available to resource-limited countries “at no profit.”
FDA
Perhaps the most interesting of the pile of FDA rejection letters was for Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA therapy. Letters sent to Stealth BioTherapeutics, Regeneron and more were also released as the agency also promised future CRLs “promptly after they are issued to sponsors.”
CDC
The new additions would bring ACIP membership to 14 total. Several of the proposed members have taken part in anti-vaccine activity or made anti-vaccine statements.
Generous severance packages, getting out of toxic workplaces and finding a better job with better pay are a few reasons respondents to a recent BioSpace survey felt that being laid off was for the best.
As more and more groups call for the health secretary’s removal from office, senators will question Kennedy on his recent moves, including the controversial firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez.