As pharma giants like Darmstadt, Germany–based Merck KGaA announce new pacts with AI companies, the drug development landscape is witnessing a familiar pattern of emerging tech adoption. AI’s promise of faster, more efficient drug discovery has captured the industry’s imagination, leading Big Pharma to ramp up investment in AI startups and partnerships. Yet, the technology’s…
Tirzepatide cut sleep apnea index by up to 63% in phase 3 trials
Today, Lilly announced promising data for the SURMOUNT-OSA phase 3 clinical trials testing tirzepatide in adults with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and obesity. The company shared the data at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) 84th Scientific Sessions while publishing them in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The SURMOUNT-OSA phase 3 trial consists…
How BMS aims to close the LGBTQ+ data gap in clinical trials
In terms of treatment outcomes, the LGBTQ+ community continues to face significant disparities. For instance, a recent study in JAMA on breast cancer outcomes reported that those from sexual and gender minority groups were more likely to face delays in diagnosis. LGBTQ+ patients were also more likely to decline oncologist-recommended therapies while experiencing a three-fold…
Why Empress Therapeutics is mining the human metagenome for novel therapies
Empress Therapeutics, which exited stealth mode a year ago, has already discovered 15 drug leads across multiple diseases and target classes. Launched in 2020, the Flagship Pioneering startup is now driving towards filing multiple IND applications within the next 24 months. While AI has played a role in compressing those timelines, the company is focusing…
Iambic and NVIDIA: Using AI to chart a faster course for drug discovery
Featured on the cover of Nature Machine Intelligence, one of Iambic Therapeutics‘ AI platforms, known as NeuralPLexer, can accurately predict protein-ligand complex structures. The platform excels at predicting the complex 3D structures formed when proteins bind with drug-like molecules. In a benchmark study featured in the publication, NeuralPLexer outperformed other systems, including AlphaFold2, in its…
How ConcertAI and NVIDIA’s AI tools are architecting faster and smarter cancer trials
Imagine tripling or quadrupling the speed at which eligible patients are matched to potentially life-saving cancer trials. That’s the promise of ConcertAI’s AI-powered screening technology, which demonstrated a 3 to 4 times efficiency gain over traditional EMR-based methods in a recent study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference. Focusing on relapsed…
Novo Holdings’ $16.5 billion Catalent buy leads 2024’s M&A deals so far
In the first five months of 2024, there was a surge in high-value deals, though none have yet matched the scale of Pfizer’s $43 billion acquisition of Seagen, which closed in December 2023. With Novo Holdings’ $16.5 billion purchase of Catalent leading the pack, 2024 reflects a mixed but strong trend toward sizable M&A…
Decoding disease with data: Merck & Culmination Bio’s quest to ‘fundamentally understand the biology’ through AI
Imagine sifting through medical and genetic histories to understand why some patients respond to treatments while others don’t. This is the reality for companies like Merck & Co. A recent pact with Culmination Bio is giving Merck access to more than 40 years of data, including millions of biospecimens to fuel this aim. “We want…
Better data can mean faster drug development, improved clinical trials and better healthcare
What’s the difference between a multimodal generative AI system to plan a vacation itinerary versus guiding cancer treatment? For the former, data quality is a definite plus, but for the latter, it’s indispensable. “If I ask ChatGPT to plan a vacation for me and it spits out something, I might sit there and second guess…
Intrepid Labs’ self-driving lab reimagines drug formulation
The pharma industry has long relied on tried-and-true drug formulation approaches sometimes rooted in trial and error, but this reliance on the familiar has created a bottleneck in the development of new and better medicines. University of Toronto Professor Christine Allen, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Intrepid Labs, points out that the traditional drug…
The 100 best-funded biotech companies from 2015 to present
In early 2022, secretive Altos Labs emerged with a sizable $3 billion launch to pursue anti-aging “cellular rejuvenation” amid rumors of Jeff Bezos’ backing. The company is the best-funded biotech in recent memory. But looking back to 2015 to present, the best funded company is Grail, which developed a multi-cancer early detection test but faced major…
How drug developers can escape from the clinical trial phase maze
It’s something of a truism that about nine out of ten drug candidates in clinical trials fail to reach the market. While some amount of guess-work is unavoidable in drug development, Dr. Ali Pashazadeh, co-founder and CEO of Treehill Partners sees faulty decision-making and poor communication as chief factors contributing to high failure rate. While…
New SEC rules and Cencora breach result in surge of pharma data breach disclosures
The pharmaceutical industry is grappling with the consequences of a significant data breach at Cencora, the prominent drug distributor formerly known as AmerisourceBergen. Recent cybersecurity rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC), which came into effect in December 2023, have also played a role in a wave of data breach reports, highlighting the…
How real-world evidence challenged anesthesia guidelines for diabetes patients on GLP-1 meds
In 2023, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) issued guidelines advising patients to discontinue GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP1-RAs) a week before surgery, citing concerns over potential operative complications, leading to delayed or rescheduled surgeries across the U.S. Dr. David Klonoff, a diabetes researcher and Endocrinologist at Mill Peninsula Medical Center, thought it was curious that…
Sanofi-OpenAI-Formation Bio partnership the latest in a string of life science genAI announcements
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…
Best-selling pharmaceuticals of 2023 reveal a shift in pharma landscape
[Updated May 21, 2024.] 2023 may not go down as the brightest year for the pharma sector, but the entry of Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic (semaglutide) into the ranks of top-selling drugs like Keytruda, Dupixent, and Eliquis signals a new era in the treatment of metabolic disease. Novo Nordisk’s sales jumped by more than one-third in…
Five keys to successfully implement functional service partnerships
Strategically selecting the right outsourcing models can accelerate the cost and time curve of drug development by maximizing quality, operational success, and financial efficiencies. To help meet increasingly demanding timelines, organizations are looking more to functional service partnership models to outsource specific functions of clinical trials (e.g., clinical operations, pharmacovigilance, medical writing, etc.). The increasing…
SciBite Chat: Elsevier’s answer to ChatGPT for life science researchers, minus the hallucinations
The life sciences industry is abuzz with the potential of generative AI, but its application in the highly regulated pharmaceutical sector faces challenges. As Jane Lomax, Ph.D., head of ontologies at Elsevier’s SciBite subsidiary notes, “Everyone across the whole industry is experimenting with it. But no one knows for sure yet how best to use…
Pharma and biotech salary review: Who’s earning the most in 2024?
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…
How Dandelion Health’s multimodal dataset promises to shed light on GLP-1 research
Dandelion Health, the maker of a real-world data and clinical AI platform, has launched the first multimodal real-world clinical dataset focused on uncovering insights and opportunities related to GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs. The company describes the GLP-1 data library as “the first multimodal real-world clinical dataset” related to GLP-1 receptor agonists. The library is sourced…
Biopharma clusters in flux: Who’s hiring, firing and building in biopharma in the first half of 2024
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.…
Beyond chemotherapy: The rise of precision medicine with radionuclide drug conjugates
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…
Laying the groundwork to tap AlphaFold 3’s potential in drug discovery
Last week, Google DeepMind launched AlphaFold 3, a significant update to its predecessor, AlphaFold 2. The latter has profoundly influenced structural biology and biomedicine in recent years while also attracting some skepticism. While AlphaFold 2 could accurately predict the structures of vast swathes of proteins, AlphaFold 3 ups the ante. It offers higher accuracy and…
Longevity biotech gaining momentum as demographic shifts drive demand for healthy aging
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…
Does biopharma R&D spending translate to results? It’s complicated
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…