[Updated March 18, 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, and Amgen are demonstrating confidence in the industry with…
Navigating the cancer progression pathway with liquid biopsy
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…
Top pharma companies ranked by 2023 R&D spend
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.…
Biotech layoffs in 2024: Identifying common threads among affected companies
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…
Anosmia to amyloidosis: nference’s AI is decoding healthcare data at scale
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…
Exploring the forces behind 2024 biotech layoffs: A visual journey
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…
Where are the top Big Pharma hubs in 2023?
By analyzing the financials of dozens of Big Pharma firms, we can pinpoint the global hubs that drive much of the industry’s innovation. This analysis reveals regions like New York, New Jersey, Tokyo, Basel, and Frankfurt metro area as core centers for pharma revenue and R&D spending. Unsurprisingly, the area with the densest concentration of…
Moving the needle on diversity in clinical trials: Where do we go from here?
Enhancing patient diversity in clinical trials has become a key priority in drug development. The main concern is that critical data that includes underrepresented patient populations is being left out as many clinical trials do not reflect all populations that may eventually take a therapy. These underrepresented groups consist of women, including those who are…
Microsoft and 1910 Genetics: AI-powered partnership targets billion-dollar savings and growth in drug discovery
The pharmaceutical industry is at a critical juncture: AI and other technological advances offer unprecedented potential, yet the cost of developing new drugs has ballooned for decades, surpassing $2 billion in recent years with the projected return on investment (ROI) falling to a mere 1.2% in 2022, according to Deloitte. Another dimension of the problem…
Pushing the frontier of drug discovery with the world’s most powerful supercomputer
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer with its dizzying 1.1 exaflop speed, is a game-changer for scientific domains ranging from drug discovery to material science and oceanography. The computer holds the top spot on the TOP500 list, an independent ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. “It’s like having a million…
2024: AI and scientists take turns at the wheel of drug discovery
In drug discovery, interest in harnessing the power of AI ramped up significantly with breakthroughs like AlphaFold, where AI predicted protein structures with astounding accuracy. AI’s initial focus was analyzing existing data, with machine learning systems excelling at tasks like predicting new drug interactions, molecular behaviors, and even biological pathways, based on troves of experimental…
BIOiSIM assigns ‘credit scores’ to drug candidates
VeriSIM Life, a San Francisco-based startup, has created BIOiSIM, an AI-powered platform that simulates drug compound behavior in the human body by acting like a virtual laboratory. It assigns each a predictive “credit score” predicting its viability for drug development. “It’s like a FICO score for drug development,” founder and CEO Dr. Jo Varshney said.…
Employees reveal highs and lows at 8 Big Pharma firms in 2024
Ahead of our deeper Pharma 50 analysis of top pharma firms’ performance, this new 2024 analysis provides a timely snapshot of cultural and innovation metrics across eight of the leading Big Pharma firms. Looking closely at the pivotal issue of “Big Pharma work culture 2024,” we examine data and reviews from the employee site Glassdoor,…
Interview: MIT legend Robert Langer backs Lindus Health’s ‘anti-CRO’ strategy
Biotech startup Lindus Health just made a big splash by adding MIT professor and Moderna co-founder Robert Langer, Sc.D., to its advisory board. Lindus aims to shake up the world of clinical trials with its “anti-CRO” approach that promises faster and more reliable trials for life sciences companies. The addition of Langer, described as the…
Deepcell’s CEO forges her own path to transforming cell science with AI and microfluidics
Deepcell co-founder Maddison Masaeli took an unexpected path from academic research to launching an AI-powered cell analysis platform. The company has raised close to $100 million in funding to support its mission. This includes a $73 million Series B round and an earlier $20 million Series A round. The company has entered into a research…
Biotech bounces back at JPM 2024 on optimism, breakthroughs and calculated bets, but uncertainties persist
At the dawn of 2024, there’s a sense of renewed optimism in the biotech sector despite recent sector-specific challenges. This week, the JP Morgan Health Care Conference witnessed strong deal-making activity. For instance, Merck agreed to acquire cancer drug developer Harpoon Therapeutics for roughly $680 million, highlighting continued interest in oncology cancer therapies. Meanwhile, Novartis…
Recursion partners with NVIDIA to unveil Phenom-Beta, democratizing access to its $1 Billion phenomics investment
In sync with the JP Morgan Health Care Conference, Recursion Pharmaceuticals has unveiled Phenom-Beta, a deep learning model designed to transform cell microscopy images into meaningful biological representations. “Phenom-Beta allows you to take images of human cells from a microscope or other sources and turn them into mathematical representations of biology,” said Chris Gibson, CEO…
The global biotech funding landscape in 2023: U.S. leads while Europe and China make strides
In 2023, the U.S. continued to demonstrate its position as the biotech funding leader, commanding over one-third, 35%, of the global investment in the sector. Overall, U.S. biotech firms attracted $56.79 billion in funding, according to a survey of Crunchbase data. Next in line was China, which contributed about 12.7% to the global funding pool,…
Pfizer veteran pays it forward through AAPS mentorship
When Cindy Oksanen started out at Pfizer’s Groton, Connecticut research headquarters in 1992, she entered an environment where female Ph.D.s in leadership positions were rare. Starting out as a lab scientist, she developed formulations for new drugs including oral dosage forms like tablets and capsules. “We would develop the dosage forms and then transfer the…
Pharma M&A activity primed for another high-flying year in 2024
Despite challenging interest rates and regulatory environment, pharma M&A activity surged in 2023 with deal volume up more than 30% from the prior year based on a review of more than 200 acquisitions since 2018. The total disclosed deal value in 2023 also more than doubled the prior year’s tally to surpass $100 billion. While…
Using AI to unlock new uses for existing cancer medicines
Repurposing is a drug development strategy that has been widely applied in cancer. This strategy, sometimes called label expansion, involves obtaining FDA approval to market a drug for the treatment of new indications, alone or in combination with other drugs. Not only can this approach extend the window of patent protection for a commercialized drug,…
Government patent seizures could curb costs but could have unintended consequences
The Biden administration has announced a new framework to enforce the government’s “march-in” rights to seize patents on drugs developed with taxpayer funding if it deems that their prices are unreasonably high. While the government has had these rights for decades thanks to the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, it has not used them previously. Before the…
AWS-NVIDIA gen-AI alliance epitomizes Big Tech’s growing interest in drug discovery
The allure of healthcare has long captivated Big Tech giants. Over the past fifteen years or so, several prominent companies in the sector have ventured into the life sciences sector with ambitious projects, only to often find themselves retreating. The dynamic appears to be changing, particularly in drug discovery, thanks in part to burgeoning data…
2024 forecast: Navigating new frontiers in pharma with AI, synthetic data, and strategic partnerships
In late 2022, we published a series of predictions, which, among other things, projected that 2023 would be a “massive showcase” for machine learning (ML) in drug discovery and development. And in many ways, 2023 was a pivotal year for AI in pharma. This evolution in AI and ML applications in pharma built upon the…
Genmab’s data-driven strategies speed up drug commercialization
Genmab’s senior vice president, global head of data science and AI, Hisham Hamadeh, describes the company’s journey to becoming “a data-driven decision-making company.” In one sense, there is little choice but to do so. “We’re swimming in data like never before. We’ve seen the volumes of data, the ability to compute on that data, and…