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…

Thermo Fisher’s Patheon division has signed an exclusive agreement with AustinPx to install the Texas CDMO’s KinetiSol technology at Patheon’s Bend, Oregon, and Cincinnati sites. AustinPx specializes in bioavailability enhancement for orally delivered small molecules, and the placement plugs into Patheon’s Quadrant 2 platform, which applies AI/ML to formulation prediction. It expands access to KinetiSol-enabled…

More than a decade ago, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) launched CancerLinQ, a platform designed to pool electronic health record data from oncology practices, turning routine patient encounters into a learning system. The platform has since become central to ConcertAI, an oncology-focused AI and real-world data company, which acquired it from ASCO in…

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…

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…

A clinician sees a pattern in their own patients. They run the numbers to check it, and the numbers seem to confirm what they already suspected. But that confirmation might not be real. “Often a clinician at the point of care will come to us with a hunch — ‘I’ve seen a bunch of these…

Merck didn’t design calderasib to be the most potent KRAS G12C inhibitor on its own. It was designed to be the most combinable inhibitor.  The KRAS gene encodes a protein that signals for cell growth. It cycles between active and inactive states, signaling when cells should divide. Although it is one of the most commonly…

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…

Technology transfer enables the movement of documented processes and knowledge from one unit, such as R&D, a pilot plant or an existing manufacturing site, to another, such as an internal site, CMO or CDMO. However, tacit knowledge, expertise that can’t be written down, is often lost in the process. As of 2022, over 86% of…

The FDA’s Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher (CNPV) pilot program was announced in June 2025 to reduce review times for drug and biological products down to 1-2 months compared with 6+ months for conventional drug and biological product applications by implementing a “tumor board” style review process. The program was envisioned to expedite review process of…

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…

Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca and more announced recent GLP-1 clinical and preclinical data at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA’s) national conference this week. The conference was eventful, with several experts being escorted out by police after handing out copies of an editorial criticizing the Trump administration’s science policies. The editorial was published in the…

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 the past several years, success has grown more elusive for American biotech firms. Even in the more robust investment climates prior to 2022, developing and growing a biotech always required a combination of risk appetite and patient capital that did not lend itself to the rapid exits typical of other areas of tech investing. …

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…

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…

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced the fast-tracking of three investigational vaccines to combat the Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV) epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. CEPI selected IAVI, Moderna and the University of Oxford’s vaccine candidates based on a global review and consultations with the WHO, Africa CDC 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…