Brian Buntz

As recently as December 10, 2025, Rezolute was a Wall Street darling. Eight analysts rated the stock a Buy, with price targets as high as $17. Its lead drug ersodetug, a monoclonal antibody, had earned two FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designations and the agency had signaled that its Phase 3 trial could support a BLA filing.…

Merck is an A+ credit, a global oncology powerhouse, and still, about half its 2024 pharma revenue came from a single product: Keytruda, a product whose loss of exclusivity will hit around 2028 in the U.S. S&P Global Ratings calls that kind of concentration a “material weakness.” Merck isn’t alone. A new S&P analysis of…

Treating obesity may directly improve psoriatic arthritis outcomes, according to Phase 3b data released Wednesday by Eli Lilly. In the TOGETHER-PsA trial, patients receiving both Zepbound (tirzepatide) and Taltz (ixekizumab) showed a 64% relative improvement in arthritis disease activity compared to those on Taltz alone. The findings suggest obesity treatment directly improves psoriatic arthritis disease…

Pharmacovigilance failures tend to surface publicly only when something goes wrong. A delayed safety signal, an inspection finding or a post market correction can quickly escalate into reputational and financial consequences for drugmakers.  Against that backdrop, shifting regional expectations are forcing companies to reconsider how local pharmacovigilance responsibilities are defined, resourced and monitored, especially for…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has enrolled the first patient in a prospective observational registry designed to generate real-world evidence on obesity treatments. The regirstry includes anti-obesity medications and GLP-1 receptor agonists. The PPD CorEvitas Obesity Registry will collect longitudinal data from both clinicians and patients. It will track how therapies are used in practice, how long…

Cell and gene therapy enters 2026 as a field of potentially curative medicine with a stubbornly small customer base. The science has delivered one-time genetic interventions for diseases that once meant a lifetime of transfusions, progressive disability, or early death. The business model, in many cases, has not: these are expensive, operationally complex products that…

Big Pharma companies are still betting big on AI, with major players pouring resources into agent platforms. The goal: unify fragmented data, streamline operations from clinical trials to sales, and enable more personalized healthcare provider interactions. Novartis has selected Salesforce’s Agentforce Life Sciences for a global rollout over the next five years. The deal follows…

GLP-1 drugs have become the hottest drug class in a generation, driven by an obesity epidemic affecting 40% of American adults and linked to diabetes, heart disease and a growing list of other conditions. But there’s a catch: up to two-thirds of adults report some level of needle fear. A 2022 PLOS One international survey…

Days after going public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Insilico Medicine has struck a multi-year oncology drug discovery partnership with France’s Servier worth up to $888 million. The collaboration will focus on developing oncology therapies, by combining Insilico’s AI-driven drug discovery platforms with Servier’s global expertise in cancer drug development.  Insilico pointed to its…

The FDA’s Dec. 30 approval of Vanda Pharmaceuticals’ Nereus (tradipitant) adds a rare new option to a category that has leaned for decades on older anticholinergics and antihistamines, including the scopolamine patch and over-the-counter products such as meclizine and dimenhydrinate. In reporting on the decision, Reuters noted the approval as the first new FDA-cleared treatment…

Drug prices are one of the rare points of overlap between President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump: both have said Americans pay too much. And they do. U.S. patients pay more than three times what people in other developed nations pay for brand-name drugs, even after accounting for rebates, according to a 2024 RAND…

The pharmaceutical industry heads into 2026 carrying strong M&A momentum, a surging Chinese deal landscape and continued buzz around obesity drugs and new modalities. Deals involving Chinese pharma and biotech firms reached $92.2 billion in potential value through November 2025. That’s nearly double the $51.9 billion recorded in 2024, according to Mark Lansdell, Director, Asset…

In some respects, AI is reinventing the very act of pharmaceutical research. Across leading biopharma companies, the image of the “bench scientist” is vanishing, replaced by a “Researcher 2.0” who spends more time training algorithms and curating datasets than mixing molecules. Tools like Life Science Dynamics’ IntelliCentral can now sweep through decades of clinical literature,…

The U.S. Senate on Dec. 16 passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 (S.355) by unanimous consent, sending legislation to the House that would require the FDA to update its regulations to reflect changes Congress enacted in 2022. The bill instructs HHS, acting through the FDA commissioner, to publish an interim final rule no later than…

You said:Oral SERD giredestrant cuts recurrence risk 30% in early HR positive breast cancer Giredestrant, an experimental oral selective estrogen receptor degrader, reduced the risk of invasive disease recurrence or death by 30% compared with standard hormone therapy in a phase 3 trial of more than 4,100 patients with early-stage, hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.…

Western drug executives long treated China as little more than a sales target. Think more than a billion potential customers, a gold mine for revenue, but nothing special in terms of fresh ideas. Lately, that thinking has changed fast. China now ranks as the world’s second-biggest pharmaceutical market. The country’s sales hit $112.8 billion in…

Recursion Pharmaceuticals dropped phase 1b/2 results Monday for REC-4881, a MEK inhibitor it flagged through AI screens. In 12 older patients (55 years old and older) with familial adenomatous polyposis, the drug trimmed total polyp burden a median 43% after three months. The gains stuck around: 12 weeks off treatment, the median drop climbed to…

Investors are pouring money into medical outpatient buildings just as pharma races to decentralize clinical research. The overlap is starting to look less like coincidence. When you look at the latest U.S. office numbers, it might appear that medical and pharmaceutical companies are retreating from real estate. Central business district towers are struggling with high…

Novo Nordisk, which helped kickstart the GLP-1 craze by expanding a diabetes drug to obesity, is slimming down the prices of Ozempic and Wegovy. That won’t necessarily translate into steep revenue drops in 2026 though. Current projections still point to rising semaglutide sales next year, and a drop in price could lead to a boost…

New CMC Process R&D center will add peptide and oligo-intermediate capabilities, expand analytical and formulation labs and target completion by September 2026. Sai Life Sciences plans to build a 100,000-sq-ft CMC Process R&D center at its integrated R&D campus in Hyderabad, aiming to double its process R&D capacity by September 2026. The project adds dedicated…

In statistics and machine learning, there’s a tradeoff between precision and recall: tune a system to be more selective and you inevitably miss more true positives. Cancer clinical trials have stumbled into a similar trap. As oncology has shifted from tumor-type-centered studies to gene-directed approaches, eligibility criteria have grown exquisitely precise. Instead of enrolling patients…

Kimberly-Clark agreed to acquire Kenvue in a cash-and-stock deal valuing the Johnson & Johnson spin-off at about $48.7 billion in enterprise value. Kenvue holders are set to receive $3.50 in cash plus 0.14625 Kimberly-Clark shares per Kenvue share, equal to $21.01 per share based on October 31 pricing, a 46% premium to Kenvue’s prior close.…

Eli Lilly is on track to overtake pharma rivals and claim the industry’s top spot by late 2026, completing one of the most dramatic repositionings in Big Pharma’s recent history. Aggressive and base scenarios place Lilly’s rise to the number one slot in 2026, while a conservative prediction forecasts that the firm will do so…

The FDA has notified manufacturers that it intends to pursue compliance actions against unapproved ingestible fluoride prescription drugs for children. In a Halloween press release, the agency said it was tightening a long-standing regulatory gap for products that have been sold for decades without new-drug approval. In it, Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.…

Biomarkers have moved from “nice-to-have” to the backbone of drug development, says Quanterix’s Jorge Marques Signes, who argues they now shape feasibility, timelines and even payer expectations before sponsors commit thousands of patients or years of spend. “Biomarkers are not supplemental anymore,” said Marques Signes, VP of Accelerator & Clinical Services at Quanterix. “They are…