The Bio Report

Many people with the genetic condition Lynch syndrome live with the near‑certainty that they will one day develop cancer and have few options beyond constant screening and, in some cases, preventive surgery. Nouscom is trying to change that by training the immune system to spot and destroy cancer cells before tumors ever form. We spoke to Marina Udier, CEO of Nouscom, about the company’s experimental cancer vaccines, how they work,...

Alzheimer’s disease drug development has long focused on slowing memory loss, but for many families, the tipping point that makes home care impossible is not cognition—it is psychosis. Hallucinations and delusions in Alzheimer’s are a distinct, prevalent, and under-recognized target for therapy. We spoke to Elizabeth Thompson, executive vice president and head of R&D at Acadia Pharmaceuticals, about the biology behind psychosis...

RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was originally designed to prosecute organized crime. Today, it sits at the center of a landmark class action against two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies over the diabetes drug Actos. Attorney Harrison James of Wisner Baum discusses Painters and Allied Trades District Council 82 Health Care Fund v. Takeda, a national civil RICO case alleging that Takeda a...

Pancreatic cancer remains one of oncology’s deadliest diagnoses, with standard treatments often offering only transient tumor shrinkage at the cost of grueling side effects and rapid resistance. Immuneering is using transcriptomic and informatics tools to design a MEK inhibitor dosed in intense daily pulses rather than continuously. This approach aims to restore a more normal signaling rhythm in healthy cells while repeatedly ambus...

Human leukocyte antigen, or HLA, genes, help the immune system tell the difference between the body’s own tissues and outside threats. In some people, certain versions of HLA genes mistakenly flag normal proteins as dangerous, which can push immune cells to attack joints, nerves, the gut, or other organs. Many autoimmune diseases are driven by changes in HLA genes. RheumaGen is developing a new kind of gene-editing treatment that a...

Asia is quickly becoming a powerhouse for biopharma innovation, changing ideas about where breakthrough science and fast, cost-efficient drug development happen. A new McKinsey & Company report shows how countries like China, Japan, and India are each building their own strengths across the drug development continuum. We spoke to Fangning Zhang, a partner in McKinsey’s Shanghai office, about what’s driving this shift, how it co...

Leukemia once threatened Aaron Viny’s life, but now it defines his mission. Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a college student, he survived chemotherapy, central nervous system relapse, and an allogeneic stem cell transplant from his younger brother—an experience that made him aware of both the power and toxicity of conventional cancer care. Today, as a hematologist-oncologist and laboratory researcher at Columbia Uni...

When Amy Burroughs stepped in as CEO of Terns Pharmaceuticals, she not only had to fill a void created by the death of her predecessor, but also lead a strategic shift from an increasingly crowded area of metabolic disease to focus on its experimental therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia. The company’s allosteric BCR-ABL inhibitor binds to a different site on the fusion protein than most first- and second-generation tyrosine kinase...

A One‑Two Gene Therapy Punch to Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Non–muscle invasive bladder cancer is a common, slow-progressing form of bladder cancer that makes up a majority of the roughly half a million new cases diagnosed each year. For decades, doctors have relied on a weakened bacterium called BCG, an intravesical immunotherapy, as a standard treatment for early-stage disease, but it fails in about 30 to 40 percent of pat...

One of the challenges of treating brain tumors is delivering potent biologic therapies across the blood-brain barrier. Adaptin Bio has developed platform technology that harnesses a patient’s own T cells to transport bispecific therapeutic payloads across the blood-brain barrier and into other targeted tissue with an initial focus on treating glioblastoma. We spoke to Michael Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Adaptin Bio, about the un...

Despite the emergence of new modalities and drug development technologies, the cost and time to produce new therapies has changed little, and failure rates remain high. Xaira aims to change that with a systematic, AI‑driven approach that tackles three pervasive bottlenecks—choosing the right targets, designing the right molecules, and matching the right patients—by running as much work as possible in silico and using high‑dimension...

Finding New Targets on the Surface of Misfolded

One of the biggest hurdles in drug development is targeting proteins found in both healthy and diseased cells without triggering toxic side effects. In cancer, this challenge often translates into narrow therapeutic windows, collateral damage to normal tissues, and forced dose reductions that limit efficacy. The result is a crowded field where many companies chase the same well-known ...

Systemic chemotherapy remains the foundation of cancer treatment, but its widespread toxicity too often cuts short potential therapeutic benefits. NanOlogy is developing a new approach—localized cancer therapy that keeps the drug where it’s needed most. We spoke to Marc Iacobucci, managing director of Nanology about the company’s precision particle engineering platform, how it transforms existing oncology drugs into microparticles ...

One of the challenges in treating the neurodegenerative condition Alzheimer’s disease is intervening early enough in the course of illness to provide meaningful benefit. AltPep is developing therapeutics with companion diagnostics that target toxic α-sheet–containing oligomers, which are thought to form very early in the disease and act as molecular triggers of downstream amyloid pathology. These structures are believed to represen...

Biotech stocks staged a dramatic turnaround in 2025, with the XBI well outpacing the S&P 500 despite concerns over leadership changes at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Trump administration’s efforts to put constraints on drug pricing, and its broader cuts to health and science agencies. A pick-up in deal-making, along with falling interest rates, helped buoy the sector with growing anticipation for continued improve...

The approach to post-surgical pain relief has relied on short-duration treatments and notably opioids. That’s led to the associated risks of dependence and abuse, prolonged hospitalizations, and slower recoveries. Allay Therapeutics is developing an alternative to opioids to treat post-surgical pain with an initial focus on knee replacement surgeries. Allay’s guitar pick-sized polymer is implanted during surgical procedures and it ...

Physicians can learn a lot from talking to patients, and not just from the words they say, but from millions of data points from acoustic features of their speech, such as pitch, vocal cord vibration patterns, and micro-instabilities in the voice. Canary Speech has developed an AI-based diagnostic listening tool that can detect neurological and psychiatric conditions from physiological signals in the voice. We spoke to Kang Hsu, ch...

Sepsis remains one of medicine’s most intractable and costly problems, arising when an infection triggers a runaway immune response that damages organs long after a pathogen is controlled. It accounts for an estimated $53 billion in Medicare spending alone, yet more than a hundred drug trials have failed to yield a single approved drug that directly treats the underlying immune dysfunction. Inflam­matix, which grew out of work at S...

Rion is developing platelet-derived exosome therapeutics as off-the-shelf, room-temperature-stable alternatives to traditional cell therapies. The company’s lead program is advancing toward phase 3 trials in diabetic foot ulcers, and it is building a broader pipeline across musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, pulmonary, dermatologic, and women’s health indications. The company is built on stem cell research conducted at the Mayo Clini...