News
The Denton site is part of a network of manufacturing plants Novartis is building across the U.S. to make cancer drugs that must be shipped to patients quickly.
FEATURED STORIES
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.
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.
FROM OUR EDITORS
Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
Following the FDA’s refusal to review Moderna’s investigational mRNA flu vaccine last week, Commissioner Marty Makary faced questions from the U.S. president about the agency’s handling of vaccines. It’s a clear signal that the tension long brewing at the drug regulator has now gone all the way to the top.
THE LATEST
Agentic AI can help FDA staff manage meetings, conduct pre-market reviews and validate reports, among other tasks, though the agency emphasized that using this technology is optional for its employees.
Following FDA rejections, Regeneron and Scholar Rock are turning to other facilities to clear regulatory logjams created by quality problems at an ex-Catalent facility in Indiana. Novo Nordisk, meanwhile, has been tight-lipped about whether its own FDA applications have been affected.
U.K.-based pharmas will not face tariffs as long as Donald Trump is president, according to the agreement.
Following Novo Nordisk’s price cuts for its own GLP-1 medicines, Eli Lilly is offering discounts for the obesity drug purchased through LillyDirect. Both pharmas recently struck a deal with the White House for cheaper prices via the yet-to-be-launched TrumpRx.
Protego Biopharma is advancing a small-molecule drug that helps light chain proteins fold correctly, in turn addressing the underlying biological cause of AL amyloidosis.
The centerpiece of the deal is the in vivo editor TSRA-196, which in preclinical studies has shown robust editing at SERPINA1, the locus linked to alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.
The alleged deaths were detected by the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, reports from which “generally cannot be used to determine” causation or even contribution, according to the agency.
If approved, Ascendis’ TransCon CNP would become the second therapy for achondroplasia, challenging BioMarin’s Voxzogo.
As bispecifics, ADCs, protein degraders, and AI-designed mini-proteins move into the clinic, discovery teams face a new bottleneck: engineering and producing molecules whose complexity challenges conventional workflows.
As big pharmas including Takeda and Novo Nordisk flee the cell therapy space and smaller biotechs shutter their operations, these players are sticking around to take the modality as far as it can go.