The BioCentury Show

Launched in the 1970s as a generics company, Hengrui has become China’s leading innovator in R&D and dealmaking, with more than 100 NMEs in the pipeline and broad alliances with GSK and BMS. Under the leadership of Frank Jiang, EVP and chief strategy officer, Hengrui is engaging in a range of dealmaking and using its partnerships as stepping stones toward its goal of becoming one of the top biopharma companies in the worl...

Chris Arendt, CSO of Takeda, likens the AI overhaul at the pharma to gutting and rebuilding an old house, from the plumbing and electrical up, while you’re still living there. In a Fireside Chat at Grand Rounds U.S. in Seattle, Arendt sat down with Editor in Chief Simone Fishburn to discuss how Takeda is integrating AI across R&D, in and beyond the science, while still executing on the active programs in drug development....

ALS drug development has long been hampered by heterogeneity, but Angela Genge — neurologist at McGill University and CMO of AL-S Pharma — argues the field is getting closer to making that heterogeneity tractable. On The BioCentury Show, Genge discusses progress in pathway prioritization, progression-rate prediction, and endpoint standardization with BioCentury's Selina Koch.
On the biology side, Genge expects the fi...

Richard Pops has lived the biotech roller coaster over three decades as CEO of Alkermes: an IPO, M&A, near-death events for his company, FDA setbacks, battles with an activist investor, and the satisfaction of knowing that millions of patients have benefited from the company’s medicines. He has led PDUFA reauthorization negotiations for industry, chaired BIO, and advocated for the interests of mid-sized biotechs.
As Po...

Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, believes the central problem in cancer drug development is not discovery, but a broken “translational middle.”
In a wide-ranging interview on The BioCentury Show with BioCentury Washington Editor Steve Usdin, Knudsen discussed the Parker Institute’s focus on accelerating the path from scientific breakthrough to medical impact.
As it approac...

A paradigm shift in research tools, combined with large-scale unbiased screening, has positioned the biopharma industry not only to rethink target discovery, but also to execute more faithfully on causal biology, according to Syncona CEO Chris Hollowood.
Hollowood spoke on The BioCentury Show with Editor in Chief Simone Fishburn about how discovery is evolving, why causal biology has been stuck in a loop of circularity, and wher...

The European biotech ecosystem has gone through a substantial maturation process over the past 20 years, as VC funds such as Forbion have experienced exponential growth to fund the region’s innovation. But Forbion co-founder and managing director Sander Slootweg says there’s still more that can be done to fund future European innovations and improve Europe’s competitiveness globally.
“We’ve observed...

The U.K. is excellent at invention and science, and creating institutions to further innovation, but poor at capturing their economic value, says Daniel Mahony, a problem that various forces in the U.K. are now putting serious efforts into solving.
Mahony, one of the major influential figures in U.K. biotech, is a senior partner in growth investments at Novo Holdings, and was until December chair of the U.K.’s BioIndustry ...

As AI spreads across biopharma, what will matter most is not who has the flashiest tools, but who can use them to make better medicines. In this episode of The BioCentury Show, Recursion CEO Najat Khan discusses where AI is showing measurable value now, how public techbio companies are being pushed toward proof points, and what comes next — from out-of-domain prediction to stronger data foundations and precompetitive collabor...

There is a real opportunity for artificial intelligence to dramatically transform the speed, cost and efficiency of drug development over the long term, but the uptake of AI tools across biopharma has been much slower relative to the broader healthcare environment, SoftBank’s Jacqueline Fok said on The BioCentury Show.
In conversation with BioCentury's Stephen Hansen, Fok, who is investment director, Life Sciences & He...

Caution: This episode of The BioCentury Show contains strong language.

In a candid interview with BioCentury, RA Capital Managing Partner Peter Kolchinsky warns that staffing losses and growing conservatism at FDA are slowing drug development and pushing companies to launch early-stage trials outside the U.S.
In conversation with BioCentury Washington Editor Steve Usdin, Kolchinsky also discusses U.S. policy headwinds, in...

With disease biology still murky and trials notoriously noisy, psychiatry R&D is advancing fastest where teams can solve engineering problems. Delivery, selectivity and tolerability fixes are turning long-standing hypotheses into usable medicines, says veteran CNS drug developer Steven Paul. Few drug developers have had a closer view of the field’s false starts — and occasional breakthroughs — than Paul, who h...

Why does great science so often stall before it becomes a medicine? Astellas Pharma CEO Naoki Okamura argues the bottleneck isn’t capital — it’s translation: a shortage of people, processes and platforms that can move ideas across the boundaries of biology, manufacturing, regulation and commercialization. That theme threaded through his conversation on The BioCentury Show with Executive Editor Selina Koch, surfaci...

Private equity’s expanding role in biopharma as a growth equity investor reflects both the maturation of the life sciences sector and the rising need for large-scale capital, alongside PE firms’ increasing ability to conduct the technical diligence required for investments once considered too risky for their models.
In conversation with The BioCentury Show's Stephen Hansen, Bain Capital’s Adam Koppel discussed ...

In historical terms, this is not a bear market, says Stelios Papadopoulos. There’s volatility, which is unnerving, and major issues to reckon with, but the level of anxiety in biotech doesn’t reflect the “extraordinary science, the likes of which we’ve never seen — and it’s getting better,” said Papadopoulos on The BioCentury Show.
Papadopoulos is one of the long-term leading voices of b...

When Bill Hinshaw looks back across the arc of his career — from his early days helping to commercialize Gleevec to his present role leading Fore Biotherapeutics — he sees a precision oncology field transformed by technological ambition, yet still grappling with many of the structural challenges that defined its beginnings, now compounded by the difficulty of positioning therapies within an ever more complex treatment l...

This is a previously recorded episode of The BioCentury Show from September 5, 2025. Subscribe to this channel to listen to each new episode. Visit TheBioCenturyYouTube.com to access and watch all prior episodes.

If you could redesign FDA from the ground up, what would it look like? That’s the fundamental question underlying the 2025 BioCentury Back to School essay, authored by BioCentury Washington Editor Steve Usdin,...

Elias Zerhouni personifies the American dream. He arrived in the U.S. from Algeria as a young man with a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket. Talent, ambition and hard work propelled him into a successful academic career. In 2002, he was nominated and confirmed as NIH director, and later he served in senior positions in the biopharma industry. That trajectory “would be almost impossible” today, he told BioCentury Wa...

It took Sophie Kornowski under four years as CEO of Boston Pharma to bring it from a pipeline full of in-licensed assets to an acquisition by GSK for about $2 billion in total deal value for a single MASH program. Though her first gig as a biotech CEO, Kornowski’s success was built on her years of experience as head of partnering at Roche. She discussed that pivot and the value of rolling your sleeves up on the latest episode...