Sweeping “radical” changes in both the U.S. FDA and China’s drug development landscape are keeping the global life science industry on its toes in assessing what’s temporary and what’s not, speakers said at the Bioplus Interphex (BIX) Korea 2025 conference in Seoul, South Korea, on Oct. 15.
Antibody-drug conjugate specialist Tubulis GmbH has raised a hefty €308 million (US$356 million) series C to expand clinical development of TUB-040, positioning its lead program for use in additional indications and as an earlier line of therapy.
While the pace of executive orders (EOs) coming out of the White House has slowed, the Trump administration is still churning them out. As of the end of the third quarter, President Donald Trump had issued 209 EOs. Of those, BioWorld tracked 37 that directly impact drug and device R&D, regulatory burdens, pricing and market competition.
Government and market demands on companies and their pricing strategies have shifted dramatically in the past 10 years and the pricing landscape continues to change, creating uncertain ground beneath developers’ feet. At the BioFuture conference in New York, a panel discussed how big and small companies go about their pricing strategies and build educated guesses into how that strategy might work out in the market.
Touting a science-driven, regenerative medicine-based treatment for hair loss “designed for the 21st century,” Pelage Pharmaceuticals Inc. drew a solid group of investors to the table in an oversubscribed $120 million series B round to fund an upcoming phase III program for PP-405, a topical small molecule targeting hair follicle stem cells.
Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) – the rare blood disorder characterized by premature destruction of red blood cells – found itself in the spotlight, as did shares of Omeros Corp. (NASDAQ:OMER), which closed Oct. 15 at $10.42, up $6.32, or 154%, on word of an asset purchase and license agreement with Novo Nordisk A/S for zaltenibart (formerly OMS-906).
John Squires, the recently anointed director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has determined that a machine learning patent application met the standard for patent subject matter eligibility, an outcome that seems to bode well for ML-based patent applications going forward.