Drug Discovery

The Bay Area-based pharma company Verseon began designing small-molecule drugs on a computational platform in 2002. That is well before most of the companies like Recursion and Exscientia now called AI drug discovery firms existed, and two decades before the launch of ChatGPT. Today, Verseon’s website states that its programs feature novel candidates that cannot…

Bristol Myers Squibb said Monday it will deploy an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, a prepackaged supercomputing platform that NVIDIA sells as a single standard unit, combining multiple compute racks, high-speed networking and management software into one cluster. BMS describes it as the “most powerful and energy-efficient single-owned NVIDIA infrastructure in life sciences.” That claim lands nine…

WTWH Media, the parent company of Drug Discovery & Development, announced on July 13 that it has renamed itself Arrowfly. The change applies to the corporate entity. DDD keeps its name, its URL, its newsletter, its editorial staff and its archives. The Cleveland-based company operates more than 40 B2B media brands and more than 45…

At its recent annual Science Day, Moderna signalled a strategic expansion beyond its established vaccine and rare disease franchises, unveiling new programs in in vivo CAR-T and solid tumor oncology. The firm also revealed an AI-driven research platform it says will accelerate the pace of drug discovery across its pipeline. The company publicly revealed two…

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…

Right now, more than 5,000 potential rare disease treatments are sitting on drug company shelves, according to Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF) CEO Annette Bakker. That includes drug candidates that companies have stopped actively developing, often after substantial preclinical, toxicology or early clinical work. Nonprofit organizations can help close the gap. One example is the Children’s…

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…

FDA’s RDEP in Context Developing treatments for ultra-rare diseases presents fundamental challenges for traditional evidence generation. Patient populations for these conditions range from fewer than 10 to up to 1,000, making traditional randomized clinical trial (RCT) designs impractical and possibly unethical. These constraints require sponsors to adopt flexible evidence approaches without compromising the rigor needed…

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…

Cryo-electron microscopy can deliver near-atomic and, in favorable cases, atomic-resolution protein structures, but sample preparation and grid optimization remain major bottlenecks. Immuto Scientific, co-founded in 2018 by CEO Faraz A. Choudhury, Ph.D. and CTO Daniel Benjamin, Ph.D., both electrical engineers by training, is making a narrower pitch: that for selected workflows, especially antibody-antigen analysis, its…

Covalent drugs have been a transformative medical advancement since aspirin was first approved in 1899. Penicillin followed soon after and is one of the most impactful pharmaceutical breakthroughs in human history. Since around a decade ago, an increasing number of new covalent drugs have been approved for a wide range of conditions, bringing hope to…

A team from ETH Zurich and Karolinska Institutet has developed a cross-linking MALDI mass spectrometry workflow that captures both functional response and target binding in a single assay.  Drug screening has traditionally been split between functional assays and binding assays. However, neither tells the full story. Functional assays indicate whether a drug works, but not…

Sai Life Sciences announced plans to hire more than 700 scientific, technical, and management professionals during 2026–27, citing growing global demand for integrated drug discovery, development, and manufacturing services. The Hyderabad-based CRDMO said the recruitment will span medicinal chemistry, biology, DMPK, process and analytical development, formulation development, process engineering, technology transfer, quality, peptides, business development,…

In traditional drug discovery, typical timelines for successful drugs stretch from 10 to 14 years, or sometimes even longer to bring a drug from discovery to approval. In addition to that, the cost of bringing a drug to market can range from hundreds of millions to multiple billions of dollars. In fact, the inflation-adjusted cost…

A new international collaboration backed by a pan-European EUREKA grant aims to develop targeted small-molecule therapies for hyper-inflammatory diseases driven by dysregulated neutrophil activity, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Evogene (Nasdaq: EVGN), Systasy Bioscience, and LMU University Hospital Munich announced the partnership on Feb. 11, with additional participation from the Weizmann Institute of Science. The…

Dr. Frederick Beddingfield spent more than a decade at Allergan helping scale Botox into a multibillion-dollar franchise, one of the most popular pharmaceutical options for making people look younger. He helped lead clinical and regulatory strategy for dermatology and aesthetics, then moved into startups: CMO of Kythera, the company behind Kybella that Allergan acquired for…

As of early February, TrumpRx.gov displays only a stylized Oval Office portrait of the president and the words “Coming Soon.”In early 2025, Donald Trump Jr. joined the board of BlinkRx, a digital pharmacy company that later began marketing a service it says can stand up direct-to-consumer drug programs in as few as 21 days. Within…

The pharmaceutical industry is inherently uncertain, driven by high dispersion in the value realized by successful bets in comparison to those that fail.  Speaking in the language of finance, operating a business in pharmaceutical industry is akin to investing in microcaps, where one invests in assets based on ultra long-term growth outlook, strong competitive positioning…

Clinical trials are drowning in data. In a TransCelerate/Tufts analysis published in late 2025, phase 3 protocols averaged more than 5.9 million data points, up 67% since 2020. The researchers found that nearly one-third of procedures and associated data were non-core or non-essential. In other words, a good portion of this data does not directly…

Bionpharma announced Wednesday the FDA approval of its etravirine tablets, an HIV therapy developed in partnership with STEERLife. The therapy was developed using STEERLife’s proprietary FragMelt continuous processing platform, which enables a sustainable, solvent-free manufacturing process.  Precise control: how FragMelt works with heat-sensitive drugs Etravirine is extremely sensitive to heat and shear forces, meaning traditional…

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…

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…

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted disease (STD) gonorrhea, has developed resistance to many of the antibiotics that are used to treat it. Most patients with gonorrhea take a drug called ceftriaxone, a third-generation cephalosporin antibiotic, but resistance to that is growing.  Recently, doctors have found two potential antibiotics that could treat…

Fifty years of restricted research may be coming to an end. Reports that President Trump plans to direct cannabis rescheduling would finally open federally-funded clinical trials for cannabinoid therapeutics, and force the industry to answer questions it’s long avoided. Pharma companies like Jazz (Epidiolex) and AbbVie already have cannabinoid programs. This could accelerate M&A or…