Neuroscience
Biotechs that announced series B financing this year and are looking for employees as they grow include one that received over $100 million and another that has a partnership with a Big Pharma company.
With so many unknowns, Biogen is carefully eyeing its next-gen Alzheimer’s treatment diranersen as a high-risk, high-reward project with the potential for a major payout around 2030.
Pemvidutide showed a “highly statistically significant” treatment effect in patients with alcohol use disorder. Altimmune is going up against Eli Lilly and newcomer Baseline Therapeutics, among others, in this space.
While MapLight Therapeutics’ oral schizophrenia candidate reached the main endpoint of a Phase 2 trial, analysts say Bristol Myers Squibb’s Cobenfy is likely to hold its market share.
Otsuka Pharmaceutical plans to launch Simtriyo—the first norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin reuptake inhibitor—later this year following scheduling by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Eli Lilly’s $3.8 billion play for AtaiBeckley has fueled speculation that Big Pharma is ready to embrace psychedelics. But while the acquisition does validate the drug class, analysts say it is unlikely to trigger a broad wave of Big Pharma deals.
Eighteen companies have gone public this year so far, putting 2026 on pace to record the highest number of IPOs since the pandemic-driven high of 2021.
Psychedelics, chiefly Compass Pathways’ COMP360, are unlikely to make an immediate dent in the sales of Johnson & Johnson’s depression drug Spravato, H.C. Wainwright’s Patrick Trucchio told BioSpace.
New mid-stage data from Biogen’s Ionis-partnered therapy diranersen served to both validate the tau hypothesis in Alzheimer’s disease and raise questions that could soon be elucidated by anti-tau candidates from Denali Therapeutics, Eisai and Eli Lilly.
Biogen’s new data, presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, supports a tau-focused approach to the intractable neurodegenerative disease; psychedelics are back in the news with more positive data from Compass Pathways and final guidance from the FDA; and the ATTR-CM space got a major shakeup with the late-stage failure of AstraZeneca and Ionis’ antisense therapeutic.
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