News
R&D spending across the global pharmaceutical sector climbed 1.5% in 2024, according to unreleased data from Evaluate Pharma.
FEATURED STORIES
M&A and IPOs got off to a quick start in 2025 only to crash into a wall of policy challenges. Upfront payment for licensing transactions, however, grew as pharmas looked for less-risky deals.
On the FDA’s docket this month are two expansion bids, one for GSK’s asthma drug Nucala into COPD and another for Merck’s oral cancer drug for a pair of rare tumors.
Beam Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics have each built their lead candidates on a technique billed as a safer alternative to conventional CRISPR. Clinical results have so far been promising.
Job Trends
Nineteen companies are receiving $21.4 million total in tax incentive awards to create 1,155 new life sciences jobs in Massachusetts. Moderna and Vertex received the largest awards and will add over 600 combined jobs.
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This week marked the start of the third-quarter earnings season, with Johnson & Johnson exceeding Wall Street’s expectations. Pfizer is projected to have a strong quarter, while Eli Lilly could pull ahead of Novo Nordisk in the obesity space. Moderna, by contrast, has a decidedly negative outlook.
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From a higher bar for regulatory clearance to pricing limitations, drug development is more expensive than ever. This has led firms to make tough pipeline decisions early in the development process. The result may be costly for all of us.
The new framework was well-received by biopharma analysts, who say it “largely formalizes” current COVID-19 vaccination trends.
Drugmakers will be expected to commit to aligning U.S. prices with the lowest price set in a group of peer nations for all brand products across all markets that do not currently have generic or biosimilar competition.
Most of the 15 million children with a rare disease have no FDA-approved treatments available to them. And when it comes to the most-rare conditions, there isn’t even a pipeline.
The largest Chinese licensing deal behind Pfizer’s is Novartis’ partnership with Shanghai Argo Biopharma, worth potentially more than $4 billion.
The Most Favored Nation order is unlikely to deliver broad, sustained savings without triggering legal challenges, administrative friction and unintended consequences for both the healthcare sector and patient access.
The partnership with Sirius expands CRISPR Therapeutics’ modality toolkit, especially in the cardiovascular space.
The late-stage results come in advance of pivotal data that Ionis expects to provide for its antisense oligonucleotide Tryngolza in the third quarter, building up toward a regulatory submission in hypertriglyceridemia by year-end.
In an interview on Friday, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary threw his weight behind psychedelic therapies, noting that patients taking these substances experience significant benefits for various neuropsychiatric conditions.
The deal comes three months after Pfizer inked a PD-1/VEGF partnership with Summit Therapeutics, leading BMO Capital Markets to express confusion regarding the pharma’s overall strategy.