Drug Development
Strong immunology and neuroscience sales fueled AbbVie’s latest quarterly beat as the pharma’s stock continues to hit all-time highs.
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BioSpace is launching an IPO dashboard to help the industry keep tabs on U.S. biotechs that have taken the public plunge in 2026.
As both Taysha Gene Therapies and Neurogene warm up for an important year of readouts, the Rett syndrome community is hopeful of seeing a therapy that can truly change the disease’s path.
At the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting this weekend, Merck will showcase three late-stage trials of its Kelun-Biotech–partnered TROP2-directed antibody sac-TMT that VP of Chemistry Alan Northrup says gets the payload release “just right.”
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Analysts hailed the Phase 3 head and neck cancer results as a big victory for an asset central to Genmab’s growth plans.
Eli Lilly’s next-gen weight loss drug retatrutide soundly beat Novo’s approved medicine Ozempic in weight loss and blood sugar reduction, padding the case for a regulatory application that’s expected in the first quarter of 2027.
Merck stole the show at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) annual conference, with new data on its Moderna-partnered personalized cancer vaccine leaking prior to the presentation and antibody-drug conjugate sac-TMT making a splash in endometrial cancer; Bristol Myers Squibb revealed the death of a patient with multiple sclerosis in an early-stage trial of zola-cel; and pharma is on track to easily surpass last year’s deal count.
In a Phase 1 study, treatment with Incyte’s KRAS G12D inhibitor in combination with standard-of-care chemotherapy elicited an 89% confirmed objective response rate in patients with a type of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, leading analysts to draw comparisons with Revolution Medicines’ zoldonrasib.
Since 2025, U.S. biopharma companies have raised $37.2 billion—68% of total worldwide venture capital funding in the industry—with startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston leading the way.
Sac-TMT significantly extended overall and progression-free survival for patients with advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer by 6.9 months over chemotherapy in a Phase 3 trial—becoming the first TROP2-directed ADC to do so in this setting, Merck told BioSpace.
JNJ-6143, which came from Johnson & Johnson’s $3 billion takeover of Halda Therapeutics in 2025, showed a 75% overall response rate in the Phase 1 readout.
While biopharma financing exit activity has remained strong through the third quarter, public-market performance for the same period was muted, with most of the yearly gains for the U.S. biotech-specific index largely driven by the first half of 2026.
After sitting through the full presentation on the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial at the ESMO Congress over the weekend, analysts are more keen on the personalized mRNA cancer vaccine data that last week spurred a stock selloff for both partners.
When used alongside AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi, the bispecific T cell engager Imdelltra extended survival by eight months versus Imfinzi alone in Phase 3 study testing the combo in a first-line maintenance setting—a potentially “practice-changing” outcome, according to Truist Securities.