Brian Buntz

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) will hold its 2026 PharmSci 360 meeting October 25 to 28 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The event is the association’s flagship annual gathering, drawing thousands of scientists from across academia, industry, and government. AAPS, which counts roughly 7,000 members, positions PharmSci 360…

More than five decades after the Controlled Substances Act that President Richard Nixon signed in 1970 placed psilocybin in Schedule I, the same tier as heroin and reserved for drugs the federal government deemed to have no accepted medical use, the compound is on the verge of becoming the first classic psychedelic to win FDA…

In the U.S. market, generics play a significant role in reducing overall drug spending. The FDA, for instance, estimated that the generics it approved in 2022 alone saved $18.9 billion in their first year on the market. Those savings come out of margins that keep thinning, because generic retail prices are in sustained deflation, as Brookings…

The modern GLP-1 era effectively began with semaglutide’s 2017 approval as Ozempic. While the field had evolved considerably since the FDA approval of the first GLP-1 receptor agonist, exenatide (brand name Byetta), in 2005 for Type 2 diabetes, the drug class remained injectable peptides throughout that period. Dosing intervals lengthened as molecules were engineered for…

The GLP-1 wave keeps widening Semaglutide hits the GLP-1 receptor alone, tirzepatide adds a second in GIP, and next-generation candidates layer on a third in glucagon or drop incretins altogether for amylin and FGF21 biology. The competitive map is widening, too, as the Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly duopoly meets oral small molecules, monthly dosing,…

The CDMO FUJIFILM Biotechnologies is in the midst of a growth upswing, with about $7 billion in expansion projects underway across the United States and Europe. The centerpiece is its $3.2 billion Holly Springs, North Carolina site, whose first phase came online in September 2025. A second phase is slated for around 2028. In Denmark,…

For all the hope invested in them as treatments for depression, classic psychedelics may end up offering only incremental gains for most patients, based on some of the most recent data in the field. If that thesis proves true, the arc of psilocybin, the most widely studied psychedelic of late, would broadly echo the trajectory…

spravato_annual_worldwide_sales_2019_2026More than six decades after Calvin Stevens first synthesized ketamine at Parke-Davis while searching for a safer anesthetic, the molecule has completed its migration into psychiatry, where it has become a blockbuster. Esketamine, the more potent S-enantiomer of that original compound, won FDA approval for treatment-resistant depression as a nasal spray in March 2019, then…

For decades, fatty liver disease and its more serious inflammatory form, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), were often overlooked conditions with few approved treatments. Boehringer Ingelheim is among the companies now going after them with a concerted push. “We have a program in MASH, in the liver, the LIVERAGE program, plus a robust data-generation program to…

For years, many small-molecule teams have treated comprehensive Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism and Excretion (ADME) profiling as a lead-optimization step. That is, it serves as a place to spend heavily once a lead series has already emerged. Now, Ginkgo Datapoints, Tangible Scientific and Inductive Bio are betting that AI, automation and tighter compound logistics can move…

“There’s an app for that.” The phrase became something of a mantra in the early smartphone era, as apps went from niche to mainstream after Apple opened its App Store in July 2008 and Android Market followed months behind it. Medicine caught the fever quickly. Prominent future-facing clinicians, from Scripps cardiologist Eric Topol to Singularity…

Eli Lilly used the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting to announce that its investigational triple agonist retatrutide can treat the conditions obesity drives, beyond the excess weight itself. Detailed Phase 3 results from the TRIUMPH-1 program showed the once-weekly GIP, GLP-1 and glucagon agonist cut moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea severity by up to 60.6% and…

For millions of individuals with actinic keratoses (AK), rough, scaly patches of skin caused by cumulative UV exposure, the path to preventing skin cancer can seem like a destructive ordeal. Current standard therapies, such as cryosurgery, photodynamic therapy or topical treatments like 5-fluorouracil (Efudex) and imiquimod, are often associated with severe local skin reactions that…

As Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva Systems, the influential cloud software provider for the life sciences industry, took the stage at the Veeva Commercial Summit in Boston, Salesforce announced that more than 140 life sciences organizations are using its competing Agentforce Life Sciences platform. In the mix as Salesforce clients are several marquee industry names…

Biotech is heating up again. The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI) has gained roughly 69% over the past year. Global life sciences M&A hit $240 billion in 2025, an 81% jump from the prior year, with EY reporting a record $2.1 trillion in deal capacity. Goldman Sachs expects broader M&A volume to rise sharply in…

Immunai, a startup building a foundation model of the human immune system, has expanded its oncology collaboration with AstraZeneca for the third time. Immunai is eligible to receive up to $37.5 million over 2026 and 2027 under the new agreement, which extends its AMICA-OS platform deeper into AstraZeneca’s clinical development pipeline. The two companies began…

Ozempic is by far the best-selling drug in Canada, with $2.9 billion in sales in 2025, more than three times the next best-selling drug. More than a million Canadians are currently on it. And it is going generic. Health Canada has authorized Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories’ generic semaglutide injection, making Canada the first G7 country to…

Cellular Intelligence has acquired global rights to a clinical-stage Parkinson’s cell therapy, from Novo Nordisk, which took an equity stake in the startup and retained milestone and royalty rights. Cellular Intelligence, formerly Somite AI, has raised over $60 million from Khosla Ventures, AMD Ventures, CZI, SciFi VC and others to build foundation models that predict…

Imagine you were in charge or managing a project worth potentially billions of dollars that had upwards of six million data points. You could have any system you devise in the world to integrate this data. And yet, the first tool you reach for is a standard Excel spreadsheet. . That thought experiment isn’t far…

The German mRNA specialist BioNTech made a fortune through its alliance with Pfizer. BioNTech launched “Project Lightspeed” in January 2020, days after the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence went public. It received €375M from the German government to accelerate development and production. Pfizer declined U.S. government support in the form of Operation Warp Speed R&D funding to…

After a period of post-pandemic hibernation, where growth was uneven, one closely watched measure of biopharma R&D productivity is moving in the right direction. According to the 16th edition of Deloitte’s annual Measuring the Return from Pharmaceutical Innovation report, which is tellingly titled “Navigating the GLP-1 boom,” the projected internal rate of return on late-stage…

BD, the global medical technology company, has announced a partnership with Wellstar, the non-profit healthcare provider in Georgia to bring AI-enabled medication management across Wellstar’s hospitals and care facilities. The collaboration combines BD’s Pyxis Pro medication dispensing technologies with BD Alaris Infusion Systems, with BD Incada adding AI-enabled analytics and natural-language querying for enterprise medication…

Over the past 16 months, Chinese-domiciled biotechs have featured in roughly 6 of every 26 major pharma licensing and acquisition deals, accounting for nearly one-third of total headline value. Roughly half of those deals involve firms of U.S. origin, mostly involving M&A. Just under 30% involves licensing deals with Chinese-headquartered firms while the remainder involves…

Pfizer’s $43 billion Seagen acquisition became  symbolic of its post-COVID spending spree. The acquisition gave the company an established oncology business and a deeper antibody-drug conjugate portfolio just as investors were grappling with the sharp decline of its COVID vaccine and Paxlovid sales. Fast forward to today, and now Lilly is on its own buying…

Immunotherapy has transformed lung cancer treatment, significantly improving patients’ treatment prospects. But gaps remain. In non-small cell lung cancer, 27 to 46% of patients respond to initial checkpoint inhibitor therapy, and of those who do, the majority develop resistance within four years, according to a study in Cancers 2024. What if a natural polymer produced…