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As the industry loses one of its key female leaders in GSK CEO Emma Walmsley, BioSpace profiles the women leading the industry’s smaller biopharmas.
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The mad rush for safe and effective obesity drugs has winners—including Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy—and losers. Here are five molecules that never made it to the market.
While it’s impossible to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the many obesity candidates with so many differences across clinical trials, we at BioSpace are giving it our best shot.
With results from highly anticipated trials of Eli Lilly’s orforglipron and Viking Therapeutics’ VK2735 “underwhelming” investors, William Blair’s Andy Hsieh predicts weight loss pills will play a bigger role in low- and middle-income countries than in the U.S.
Job Trends
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Sanofi announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Kevzara® for the treatment of patients weighing 63 kg or greater with active polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis, a form of arthritis that impacts multiple joints at a time.
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Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
Following restricted vaccine approvals and changes to CDC immunization schedules, Merck, Pfizer, GSK and Sanofi are all suffering revenue hits to their vaccine programs.
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With AbbVie’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ lead depression drug, the psychedelic therapeutics space has soundly rebounded from Lykos’ rejection last year. There are now seven programs in Phase III trials across the sector, with multiple companies vying for that first approval.
A decade-long journey has come to an end for Stealth BioTherapeutics and the Barth syndrome community with the first-ever treatment for this uncommon mitochondrial disease. CEO Reenie McCarthy called it a “pivotal victory” that “offers hope for expedited regulatory attention to other ultra-rare diseases.”
After a tension-packed two days that saw recommended changes to the MMRV vaccine schedule and COVID-19 vaccine access, as well as a delayed hepatitis B vaccine vote, policy experts expressed concern with the reconstituted committee’s dearth of previous experience and understanding of their role.
Bluebird bio has re-emerged after a private equity buyout as Genetix Biotherapeutics, marking a return to its roots and a new path forward for manufacturing.
BMO Capital Markets analysts said the first day of the CDC vaccine advisory committee meeting Thursday had anti-vaccine overtones as the panel, which was revamped by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in June, voted to recommend that children under four receive the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine separately from a chickenpox vaccine. Today the advisors will vote on changing the childhood schedule for the hepatitis B and COVID-19 vaccines.
Investors had been “holding out hope” that there remained a regulatory path forward for RP1, but results of Replimune’s Type A meeting with the FDA do not appear to support this, according to BMO Capital Markets.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has cleared proposed legislation that could bring back the FDA’s rare pediatric priority review voucher program, which allows for expedited drug reviews.
Nektar Therapeutics still needs to establish what differentiates rezpeg from other atopic dermatitis therapies, according to analysts at William Blair.
VectorY Therapeutics will evaluate the use of SHP-DB1, a capsid developed by Shape Therapeutics, to deliver therapies to the brain, including VectorY’s developmental Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s disease treatments.
This year, Novo Nordisk and Merck announced significant layoffs, with Novo planning to axe about 9,000 employees and Merck projecting it could let go of roughly 6,000. Meanwhile, Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis and Pfizer have also made noteworthy cuts.