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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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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customers six years ago, but did not report any profits from those sales on its 2019 tax returns because all of the income was supposedly earned offshore, according to an investigation by the Democratic staff of the Senate Finance Committee.

As a result, the company was able to avoid paying billions of dollars in federal income taxes and, in fact, also did not report any taxable income in the U.S. for 2018 and 2020. To accomplish this, Pfizer used what was described as an “egregious tax gimmick” called “round-tripping,” a tax avoidance scheme that involves making sales to U.S. customers, but treating the profits as foreign income for tax purposes.

Often, round-tripping refers to offshoring manufacturing to a foreign subsidiary located in another country or jurisdiction with lower tax rates. The list includes Puerto Rico and Ireland, where Pfizer has various operations. Another tactic is to shift intellectual property rights to such havens or engage in transfer pricing, which involves a company selling itself products at artificially high prices.

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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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After all, the neurons could use all the help they can get, would you not agree? Meanwhile, here are a few items of interest for you to digest as you embark on your own journey today, which we hope is meaningful and satisfying. On that note, time to hustle. Best of luck, and do keep in touch. …

Prominent outside scientists who help the U.S. National Institutes of Health evaluate its internal research programs are being abruptly removed, according to five advisers whose positions were terminated and a recording of an internal meeting obtained by STAT. The motivations behind the removals from the agency boards of scientific counselors remain unclear. But among those being terminated are non-U.S. citizens, women, scientists from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and individuals whose research focus or other work touches on areas the new administration considers taboo, such as diversity and equity. The removals come amid a broader attempt by the Trump administration to align health agencies with the president’s views on DEI, gender, immigration, and other issues, by terminating grants mentioning words like “diversity” or focused on environmental justice, while explicitly targeting such employees for removal.

GSK has teamed up with two research organizations in the U.K. to explore a possible link between its shingles vaccine Shingrix and a reduced risk of dementia, Pharmaphorum says. The tantalizing hypothesis — drawn from observational and retrospective studies — is that vaccination against shingles can help protect against dementia in the following years. To test it prospectively, GSK will work with the UK Dementia Research Institute and Health Data Research UK to use de-identified, population-level electronic health data from the National Health Service to look at the impact of shingles vaccination on dementia risk. Their study will look at real-world data from around 1.4 million people aged 65 and 66 at the time that the U.K. expanded its shingles national immunization program in 2023. Research has already shown that vaccines against shingles potentially reduce the risk of dementia, but past studies only identified associations, not causality.

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Pharmalot and the rotation will likely include this, this, this, this and this. And what about you? Once again, we maintain there is no better time to enjoy the great outdoors. And as seasonal festivities approach, you could start searching for the great pumpkin or, if you are particularly ambitious and visit the correct locales, you could hunt down your own turkey. For those inclined to hang around Gotham, there are always museums and moving picture shows to take in. Or you could hide indoors with a good book. Well, whatever you do, have a grand time. But be safe. Enjoy, and see you soon. …

CVS Health is naming longtime executive David Joyner as its new chief, succeeding Karen Lynch at the helm of the struggling health care giant, The Wall Street Journal writes. Joyner has been president of CVS Caremark, the company’s pharmacy benefit manager, as well as an executive vice president of CVS. He is set to take over as president and chief executive on Friday. CVS is making the changes after repeatedly cutting its forecasts for this year’s financial performance, moves that led to a 19% decline in its share price this year, a push for changes by a major hedge fund, and a board review of strategy that included the option of breaking up the company. Joyner will face a difficult task. Not only must he turn around CVS’s Aetna health insurance business, but he must also contend with U.S. Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of pharmacy benefit giants including Caremark. CVS also faces longstanding challenges in the retail pharmacy business. 

Donald Trump has backed off his ambitious plans to slash U.S. drug prices and repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving something of a vacuum in his health policy agenda. One former Trump White House official says the policy ideas are there — but enacting them could take messy fights, STAT tells us. The official, Joe Grogan, said Republicans will need to repeal or revisit President Biden’s signature drug pricing law and expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, should Trump take office. Trump had previously proposed tying U.S. drug prices to a basket of payments made by similarly wealthy countries, but has retreated from that approach. Grogan said this is because Biden’s plan to let Medicare negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies, passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, changed the landscape. As the provisions go into effect, this has raised premiums, which Grogan forecasted could cause a “death spiral” in Medicare Part D, the program’s prescription drug benefit.

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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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So grab that cup of stimulation and get started. Our flavor today is tiramisu, for those tracking our habits. Now, though, the time has come to get busy. So please grab your own cup and dig in to the items of interest assembled below. We hope you have a wonderful day, and please do keep in touch. …

A major California health insurer is set to offer one of the world’s top-selling drugs for free in a bid to show the medicine can reach Americans affordably without going through the middlemen that typically control its flow, The Los Angeles Times says. Blue Shield of California struck an unusual deal to buy a lower-cost version of Humira directly from a manufacturer, bypassing the giant pharmacy benefit managers that normally determine which maker’s drug will go to tens of millions of Americans. AbbVie’s Humira has been a prime example of how drug prices can stay high even after drugmakers lose patent protection. Sales of Humira, at one point the world’s top-selling drug, were $14 billion last year even after low-cost versions hit the market. Blue Shield of California currently spends more than $100 million a year on Humira, more than any other drug. The new lower prices and lack of fees for middlemen should result in a savings of $20 million over three years, executives said, adding that the figure might be a low estimate.

In response to increased criticism of its pricing, Gilead Sciences has reached voluntary licensing deals with companies to make generic versions of its twice-yearly HIV medicine, lenacapavir, in 120 mostly low- and lower-middle-income countries, STAT reports. The move comes after a pair of late-stage clinical trials found the injectable medicine was highly effective in preventing HIV, paving the way for the company to seek regulatory approval for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. The results generated considerable excitement since a daily pill is nearly 100% effective but compliance is spotty and there is a stigma attached to regularly taking a drug for HIV. But its impact on addressing an epidemic that, as of 2022, still led to more than 1 million new infections each year is uncertain. And the reason is pricing. Lenacapavir is already approved for treating HIV but has a hefty price tag of $42,250. So patient advocates have been urging the company to reach a licensing deal but also lower its price. The criticism was heightened after a recent analysis found that the medicine could be made for as little as $26 to $40 a year. As a result, Gilead is hoping its licensing plan will appease critics.  

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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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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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