News

The discovery of a tumor in a patient who received REGENXBIO’s gene therapy for Hurler syndrome prompted the FDA to place a hold on that program along with the company’s Hunter syndrome program, which is awaiting an FDA decision on or before Feb. 8.
FEATURED STORIES
JPM
With the biopharma industry performing better of late, analysts, executives and other industry watchers are “cautiously optimistic”—a term heard all over the streets of San Francisco at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference earlier this month.
Bristol Myers Squibb, GSK and Merck are contributing drug ingredients as part of their deals with the White House but are keeping many of the terms of their agreements private.
Some 200 rare disease therapies are at risk of losing eligibility for a pediatric priority review voucher, a recent analysis by the Rare Disease Company Coalition shows. That could mean $4 billion in missed revenue for already cash-strapped biotechs.
FROM OUR EDITORS
Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
The FDA’s rare pediatric disease priority review voucher program missed reauthorization at the last minute in 2024; advocates have been fighting to get it back ever since.
THE LATEST
In this deep dive, BioSpace explores the diverse therapeutic modalities now in development, as well as the opportunities and battles for market dominance in this emerging space.
Mineralys’ shares got a more than 50% boost Monday morning as new data showed its hypertension drug reduced blood pressure in a pair of clinical trials.
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.