Drug Discovery and Development

While there are currently no FDA-approved AI-discovered drugs, interest in generative AI (genAI) could be a game-changer for the pharmaceutical industry in the coming years. Sanofi, which has signaled its intent to go “all in” on AI, has inked a deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Formation Bio to build AI-powered software to speed drug…

Using job posting data gathered via the data aggregation service Apify.com, we sifted through a total of 1,755 recent pharma and biotech job listings to find, unsurprisingly, that managers working in senior and director-level roles are the best-paid in the industry. Across the entire data set, the median salary range for the job descriptions was…

The biopharma’s layoff woes continue to make headlines, but the news is not all negative. To get a clearer picture, we gathered data on layoffs, new plant announcements and companies hiring, including specific coordinates for locations down to the address level, when possible. After clustering the data, we identified the top- and worst-performing global hubs.…

The success of any organization is dependent on consistent, clear, and reliable information sharing among all internal stakeholders. In the pharmaceutical industry, where there are multiple complex layers within manufacturing processes, communication among teams is especially critical. If information-sharing gaps occur among these layers, vulnerabilities could result in costly errors impacting all levels of the…

Radionuclide Drug Conjugates (RDCs) hold the potential to transform cancer treatment by offering effective, precise treatment and diagnosis with minimal side effects. Regulators have already approved several RDCs around the world, and more are in the pipeline as researchers seek to further improve their efficacy, safety, and personalization. RDCs have evolved from other branches of…

Is aging a disease or a natural process? That question has emerged as a point of debate among researchers, medical professionals and philosophers. Some, like biogerontologist David Gems, argue that lines between aging and disease are frequently blurry, and that intervening in the aging process “protects against the totality of age-related diseases.” Other researchers such…

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) recently unveiled the launch of the CDER Center for Clinical Trial Innovation (C3TI), which aims to drive clinical trial innovation. When asked to assess the potential impact of the center, Charles Fisher, founder and CEO of Unlearn, said: “The truth is, I don’t know. I’m sort…

Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind have unveiled AlphaFold 3, a powerful AI system that draws on a novel diffusion-based architecture to accurately model the structures of complexes containing proteins, nucleic acids, DNA and RNA strands, small molecules, ions and modified residues. Diffusion models are a type of generative model that has won significant popularity in…

Over the past few decades, structural biology has undergone a quiet renaissance, thanks in large part to technological advances in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and computational techniques. Cryo-EM has emerged as a powerful tool for determining the high-resolution structures of proteins and protein complexes, complementing traditional methods like X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)…

A recent review of financial data from 25 major pharmaceutical companies reveals an inconsistent relationship between R&D spending, revenue, and stock returns. The analysis, which included industry giants such as Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AbbVie, among others, aimed to uncover potential correlations between these key performance indicators. The companies with the highest highest…

Deloitte’s 14th annual report on pharma innovation reveals a modest uptick in R&D returns for 2023, with the projected internal rate of return (IRR) for the pharma sector rising to 4.1% after hitting a low of 1.2% in 2022. Yet the report emphasizes the need for biopharma companies to adapt to ongoing challenges and leverage…

Which major pharmaceutical company leads the way in research and development? Data reveals that the top R&D spender in 2023 was Merck & Co., by a wide margin. While Pfizer had almost as much revenue as Merck ($60.1 billion vs. $58.5 billion), its R&D ratio was on the lower end at 18.29%, or $10.7 billion.…

[Updated May 10, 2024] In the face of rising R&D costs and growing pricing pressures from payers, the pharma and biotech sectors continue to transform to adapt to an evolving landscape. While workforce reductions persist in 2024 for some companies, major players like AbbVie, AGC Biologics, Amgen, Novartis and Thermo Fisher Scientific are demonstrating confidence…

Medincell and AbbVie today announced a collaboration to co-develop and commercialize up to six therapeutic products across several areas. The partnership spans multiple therapeutic spaces and indications. Under the agreement, Medincell will use its commercial-stage, long-acting injectable technology platform to formulate innovative therapies. It plans to conduct formulation activities and preclinical studies, including supportive CMC…

Ypsomed announced today that it entered into a partnership with ten23 health to develop therapeutics for the YpsoDose wearable injector. Burgdorf, Switzerland-based Ypsomed designed YpsoDose for the subcutaneous self-injection of large-volume doses. ten23 health, a Swiss CDMO, offers drug development, filling and device assembly expertise to contribute to the product offering. The strategic collaboration sees…

The top 20 healthcare-focused biotech companies collectively raised $2.9 billion in the first quarter of 2024, according to data sourced from Crunchbase. That represents a 161% increase compared to the $1.1 billion raised by the 20 largest funding rounds involving healthcare-focused biotech companies in Q1 2023, indicating more confident bets on the market viability of…

The first quarter of 2024 saw a flurry of funding activity in the biotech sector, with early-to-mid-stage companies attracting most of the investment dollars. Among the most notable late-stage deals was blood-based cancer diagnostics firm Freenome‘s $254 million Series E round. The South San Francisco-based company, which is developing a platform for early cancer detection…

Over the past decade, the use of deeper sources of real-world data across all stages of the drug development life cycle has become increasingly important to guide disease understanding, trial designs, clinical guidelines, regulatory submissions and post-market studies. The advent of these deeper sources was prompted by the HITECH Act, which had the effect of…

The biotech sector could see a period of relative stability, according to a time-series analysis of the NASDAQ Biotech Index. In recent years, however, performance of the NBI has had little bearing on the rate of layoffs in the pharma and biotech sectors. A statistical analysis of the relationship between the NBI performance and the…

Flow chemistry techniques are increasingly being used in drug discovery to provide cost-effective access to a wide range of structurally diverse small molecule analogs, as well as access to previously underused or inaccessible chemistries. There are several ways that this powerful technique can be used to increase structural diversity when building candidate molecules, including linear…

We can design chips that power self-driving cars and create physically-realistic video footage based on text descriptions. Yet, as Genentech’s Aviv Regev pointed out in a session about the company’s lab in the loop at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, the humble cells within us operate with a complexity that still eludes our full understanding. It turns out that a cell is itself like a computational device…

Tumor heterogeneity analysis is a challenging but critical step for the advancement of cancer therapy research. DNA mutation interrogation and gene expression pattern evaluation are crucial for predicting a tumor’s response or resistance to specific drug or hormone treatments. Liquid biopsy has emerged as a promising tool, offering a rapid, minimally invasive method for early…

Companies across the industry have contributed to biotech layoffs in early 2024, driven by factors ranging from operational restructuring to strategic pivots and clinical trial failures, with major hubs like California and Massachusetts bearing the brunt of the impact. A recent analysis assembled with the help a machine learning technique known as clustering reveals a pattern of job…

The complexity of patient records, with their mix of unstructured notes and diverse data types, defies traditional analysis. While a thorough review of even a single patient’s file can be tedious  for a human, AI tools offer the power to analyze tens or even hundreds of millions of records, unlocking data patterns that would otherwise…

Biotech layoffs continue to pummel the industry in early 2024 — albeit at a slightly lower clip than in 2023. Smaller firms continue to bear the brunt of funding woes and disappointing clinical data. From January to February, operational reorganizations fueled 45 layoff announcements, followed closely by strategic pivots in 37 events. Other common drivers…