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Good morning! Before we get to biotech, check out STAT’s deep dive into how UnitedHealth mobilizes a massive network of physicians and milked the health care system for profit.

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Good morning. It’s been a challenging time for workers in the biopharma industry. We’ve seen companies announce layoffs one after another, and people online talk about how it seems increasingly difficult to secure a new job. Read our latest on this subject below, with new numbers on the state of the job market.

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Hello! Hope your weekend was a blissful one. Today, we talk about AbbVie’s outsize marketing spend, see how GLP-1s are impacting cancer rates, and more.

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Vallabh and her husband, Eric Minikel, scientists at the Broad Institute, have been racing to develop a treatment for prion disease, a rare form of neurodegeneration that killed her mother at age 51 and would, if left untreated, likely kill Vallabh as well. It’s an insidious disease. Although it can have several causes, in her case, a single genetic misspelling will lead neurons to produce misfolded versions of otherwise workaday proteins called prions. These mutant prions jump cell to cell, like viruses, misfolding other prions they touch and forming toxic, neuron-killing chains.

So why not use CRISPR to repair or remove the mutant gene?

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Good morning. Read on today for some exclusive hiring news and a retraction of a high-profile paper on cancer detection.

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Good morning. It’s Wednesday, which means it’a also “The Bear” season 3 premiere day. For my Boston readers, know that Ayo Edebiri has been thinking deeply about the tragedy of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

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And here is our regular feature in which we highlight a different person each week. This time around, we note that Recludix Pharma hired Ajay Nirula as executive vice president and head of R&D. Previously, he worked at Eli Lilly, where he was senior vice president and the immunology therapeutic area head.

But all work and no play can make for a dull head of R&D.

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Cerevel Therapeutics, a neuroscience biotech that AbbVie is acquiring, reported that its drug for Parkinson’s disease improved motor symptom control as an add-on therapy in a late-stage trial.

The 27-week study found that patients taking the drug, tavapadon, on top of a common Parkinson’s treatment called levodopa, experienced 1.7 hours of improvement in “on time” without dyskinesia, which is the amount of time patients function well without involuntary movements that can be brought on by levodopa. That compared to 0.6 hours of improvement among patients taking placebo and levodopa.

This difference was statistically significant and clinically meaningful, Cerevel said in a press release Thursday. There was also a statistically significant decrease in “off time,” the amount of time patients experienced symptoms. The full results will be submitted for presentation at future medical meetings.

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New biotech newsletter launching this Thursday. Don’t miss out.

Hello, everyone. Damian here with a look at a pivotal FDA approval, good news for a small biotech company, and why not all buyouts are worth writing home about.

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On Thursday night, President Biden proposed expanding one of his most popular policies: the Medicare price negotiation process that was put in place as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. “Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere else,” Biden said. “It’s wrong and I’m ending it.”

Obviously, the drug industry is not going to be happy about new price limitations in the U.S., the biggest market for pharmaceuticals. But, even more than that, Biden’s move emphasizes a painful reality: That pharmaceutical companies remain one of the biggest political targets in the country — despite their key role in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic and their development of wildly effective new weight loss drugs.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…