Biopharma trends

Kathy Fernando, the senior vice president, head of Pfizer Ignite and Pfizer CentreOne, has had a professional trajectory marked by pivotal serendipities. One occurred when attending a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she met Dr. Drew Weissman, a prominent immunologist and RNA vaccine researcher. Weissman, along with Katalin Karikó, recently received the Nobel…

Novo Nordisk will halt the phase 3b FLOW trial, which investigated the effects of once-weekly injectable semaglutide on kidney outcomes in individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). The company reached the decision following the recommendation of the independent Data Monitoring Committee (DMC), following an interim analysis that met pre-specified criteria…

As obesity rates continue to soar across the globe, analysts anticipate that the market for anti-obesity drugs will skyrocket in the coming years. Goldman Sachs projects the market to be worth $44 billion by 2030. That’s an almost 16-fold expansion from its valuation of approximately $2.82 billion in 2022. Barclays is even more upbeat on…

2023 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for promising biotech startups. While the sector faced multiple waves of layoffs, a silver lining is evident: the growing maturity of AI and genomics technologies is fueling a new wave of startup advances, especially in drug development. Amidst the backdrop of that turbulence, a select group…

mRNA technology helped propel the development of some of the most successful drugs in pharma history — notably, the Comirnaty COVID-19 from Pfizer/BioNTech generated almost $56 billion in 2022 while Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine raked in $18.4 billion. But demand for COVID-19 vaccines continues to cool. In 2023, Comirnaty brought in $15 billion between its two…