STAT

STAT+: Flatiron Health veterans raise $25 million for AI tool to forecast drug toxicity

In January, San Francisco’s Union Square was bustling with hordes of drug developers and investors, pounding the pavement on their way from meeting to meeting. But Rohan Ganesh, an investor at the VC firm Obvious Ventures, wasn’t among them. He only agreed to hear one company’s pitch during this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

The meeting was with a startup created by Flatiron Health veterans Josh Haimson and Ben Birnbaum. The duo had built the first team at Flatiron focused on machine learning, and, a few years after pharmaceutical giant Roche snapped up the company for $1.9 billion, they launched their own company.

Their new venture, Inductive Bio, has created an artificial intelligence tool that biotechs can use to design and model different versions of a small-molecule drug, sussing out what variation might cause drug toxicity or be metabolized too quickly. 

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1 month 4 days ago

Biotech, Exclusive, Artificial Intelligence, biotechnology, drug development, STAT+, venture capital

STAT

STAT+: In Ireland, a global hub for the pharma industry, Trump tariffs are a source of deep worry

The hulking factories are tucked away off the roads around the village of Ringaskiddy — operated by the likes of Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and BioMarin, whose plant featured signs last week touting a new facility “coming Q1 2027.”

The nearby town of Carrigtwohill crows that it’s grown “+400% over the past 20 years,” a surge driven by sites run by AbbVie and Gilead. 

The hulking factories are tucked away off the roads around the village of Ringaskiddy — operated by the likes of Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and BioMarin, whose plant featured signs last week touting a new facility “coming Q1 2027.”

The nearby town of Carrigtwohill crows that it’s grown “+400% over the past 20 years,” a surge driven by sites run by AbbVie and Gilead. 

And down in Kinsale, an Eli Lilly campus rises up out of the Irish countryside, a hub that recently underwent an $800 million expansion to meet the surging demand for the company’s obesity and diabetes drugs. Placards along the edge of the property celebrate Lilly’s sponsorship of the upcoming Kinsale 10-mile road race

“It’s absolutely everything to this area,” Jack White, a member of the County Cork council, told STAT, referring to the presence of pharma manufacturing here. 

President Trump is less fond of the industry’s operations in Ireland. As he seeks to impose tariffs on goods worldwide, part of a bid to bring companies back to the U.S. and generate jobs, he has specifically called out pharma manufacturing in this country and pledged to announce new levies on drugmakers. In his view, the U.S. trade imbalance with Ireland — one largely driven by pharmaceutical exports — is a particular injustice. As a result, the industry is now caught in his crosshairs, anxiously awaiting details from the administration.

“All of a sudden Ireland has our pharmaceutical companies, this beautiful island of five million people has got the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry in its grasp,” Trump said in a March meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin marking St. Patrick’s Day. “I’d like to see the United States not have been so stupid for so many years, not just with Ireland, with everybody.”

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Biotech, Pharma, Pharmaceuticals, policy, STAT+

STAT

NIH director targets misinformation research as more turmoil rocks health agencies 

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Good morning. Let’s get straight into the news today.

Want to stay on top of the science and politics driving biotech today? Sign up to get our biotech newsletter in your inbox.

Good morning. Let’s get straight into the news today.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Biotech, Business, Pharma, The Readout, biotechnology, drug development, drug prices, Research

STAT

STAT+: AbbVie, J&J to add proprietary data to AI protein model in bid to accelerate drug discovery

Imagine standing on a vast, dark plain. Without light, you cannot see dips and rolls in the grass or make out hills and valleys. Even if there’s a city off in the distance to your right, it does nothing to illuminate the darkness on your left, unless there are pinpricks of light there which might indicate a mountain or level ground.

So, too, is the vast, unexplored drug-hunting territory of chemical space, waiting to be illuminated by data’s light.

Every AI model trained for biology only can see what’s illuminated by the data points it is trained on. AlphaFold succeeded in predicting protein structures because the 200,000 or so known protein structures in the Protein Data Bank covered enough of the limited ways amino acids can combine that the model was able to understand what almost the entire protein structure space looked like. But ask the PDB for only the structures where proteins are hugging other proteins or — even rarer — interacting with drug-like molecules, and there’s nowhere near enough illumination for AI biology models to understand what the topography of those plains look like, much less make useful predictions for drug discovery.

Life sciences data company Apheris on Thursday announced an effort to boost the capabilities of protein AI models by uniting several pharmaceutical companies’ proprietary data. Apheris’ consortium of pharma companies is partnering with OpenFold3 — Columbia professor Mohammed AlQuraishi’s open-source dupe of AlphaFold3 — to train the model on AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s vast stores of structural data. The collaboration will focus on structures relevant to drug discovery, such as small molecule-protein and antibody-antigen interactions. 

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Biotech, Health Tech, Pharma, Artificial Intelligence, Health Tech, STAT+

STAT

Altis says its AI tool can cut risk in cancer trials

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Good morning. The MAHA movement is influencing not only the federal government, but also state legislatures across the U.S. We discuss all that and the key biotech news today.

Want to stay on top of the science and politics driving biotech today? Sign up to get our biotech newsletter in your inbox.

Good morning. The MAHA movement is influencing not only the federal government, but also state legislatures across the U.S. We discuss all that and the key biotech news today.

Read the rest…

2 months 2 weeks ago

Biotech, Business, Pharma, The Readout, biotechnology, drug development, drug prices, Research

STAT

STAT+: Ron Renaud, biotech’s serial CEO, is ready for a new assignment — and maybe another deal?

This story first appeared in Adam’s Biotech Scorecard, a subscriber-only newsletter. STAT+ subscribers can sign up here to get it delivered to their inbox.

This story first appeared in Adam’s Biotech Scorecard, a subscriber-only newsletter. STAT+ subscribers can sign up here to get it delivered to their inbox.

When it comes to delivering shareholder value through M&A, Ron Renaud is a biotech investor’s best friend. Over the last 10 years, all three of the companies he has helmed were sold to Big Pharma for a combined $16 billion. 

With that track record — and the financial windfall it brings — no one would have begrudged Renaud, 55, had he desired to spend more time with his Cape Cod fishing buddies. But he can’t quit biotech. Weeks after overseeing the close of Cerevel Therapeutics’s $8.7 billion acquisition by AbbVie, Renaud is back as CEO of Kailera Therapeutics, a newly formed company with a pipeline of weight loss drug candidates.

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8 months 1 week ago

Adam's Take, Biotech, biotechnology, Obesity, STAT+

STAT

Lilly invests $4.5 billion in a new research hub

This story first appeared in The Readout newsletter. Sign up for The Readout and receive STAT’s award-winning biotech news delivered straight to your inbox. 

This story first appeared in The Readout newsletter. Sign up for The Readout and receive STAT’s award-winning biotech news delivered straight to your inbox. 

Good morning. Today, we look at the biggest biotech events to watch this quarter. And as my editor had to remind me (since I’m still in denial), we are indeed in the fourth quarter now.

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8 months 1 week ago

Biotech, Business, Pharma, The Readout, biotechnology, drug development, drug prices, Research

STAT

STAT+: $400 million for an obesity drug startup? A new venture is a sign of the times

Atlas Venture and Bain Capital Life Sciences are making their next bet in the buzzy obesity field, launching a new startup led by a chief executive hot off of his third acquisition deal.

Atlas, Bain, and RTW Investments announced Tuesday that they have co-led a $400 million Series A financing for a new Boston-area startup company called Kailera Therapeutics. The investors have also brought in a familiar face: Ron Renaud, who recently oversaw the $8.7 billion acquisition of Cerevel Therapeutics, a spinout of Pfizer assets that Bain helped finance back in 2018. 

Kailera’s series A round total is one of the largest in the biotech industry this year, and speaks to just how much attention weight loss medications have garnered from investors.

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8 months 1 week ago

Biotech, biotechnology, Obesity, STAT+

STAT

Biotech’s real estate market is still upside down

This story first appeared in The Readout newsletter. Sign up for The Readout and receive STAT’s award-winning biotech news delivered straight to your inbox. 

Good morning. It’s another busy news day, and I’m layering up at home to avoid turning the heater on. Fall is officially here.

This story first appeared in The Readout newsletter. Sign up for The Readout and receive STAT’s award-winning biotech news delivered straight to your inbox. 

Good morning. It’s another busy news day, and I’m layering up at home to avoid turning the heater on. Fall is officially here.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Biotech, Business, Pharma, The Readout, biotechnology, drug development, drug prices, Research

STAT

STAT+: AbbVie Parkinson’s drug helps improve symptoms in late-stage study

This story first appeared in The Readout newsletter. Sign up for The Readout and receive STAT’s award-winning biotech news delivered straight to your inbox. 

This story first appeared in The Readout newsletter. Sign up for The Readout and receive STAT’s award-winning biotech news delivered straight to your inbox. 

AbbVie reported Thursday that its experimental Parkinson’s drug that it got from Cerevel Therapeutics helped alleviate symptoms and improve quality of life in a late-stage study.

In the Phase 3 trial, early-stage Parkinson’s patients on the highest dose of the drug, called tavapadon, experienced a 10.2-point improvement on tests that measured motor symptoms and quality of life, also known as the MDS-UPDRS parts II and III. Meanwhile, those on placebo saw a 1.8-point worsening.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Biotech, biotechnology, chronic disease, STAT+

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