• Sanofi said it would be able to spend about €15 billion on dealmaking in an effort to ease its looming Dupixent patent cliff. Dupixent, an immunology megablockbuster that pulled in about $18 billion last year, is expected to lose patent exclusivity in the early 2030s.
• Sanofi also trimmed some of its pipeline efforts and vowed to stay committed to vaccines despite an increasingly challenging sales environment.
• Roche said its experimental breast cancer pill could become its best-selling drug. The drug, an oral SERD called giredestrant, was submitted for its first approval late last year.
• Takeda’s incoming CEO Julie Kim said the company is “not in favor” of President Donald Trump’s “most favored nation” deals. Trump has secured 16 MFN deals among the 17 companies he sent letters to last year calling for agreements, with Regeneron as the lone holdout.
• Regeneron execs said they are “actively engaging” in discussions with CMS and other federal agencies. An eventual deal is expected to be “in line with the frameworks” from other MFN deals.
• Meanwhile, Teva CEO Richard Francis touted his company’s transition from a generics manufacturer into a biopharma company.

🔬A startup called Life Biosciences got the FDA’s permission to start a clinical study of its gene therapy designed to rewind the clock on dying cells, the company told Endpoints News’ Ryan Cross in an exclusive interview. Life Biosciences was co-founded by Harvard biologist David Sinclair, who in the late 1990s proposed that aging is primarily due to the loss of epigenetic information. Life Bio’s therapy delivers a trio of proteins that Sinclair’s lab says has the ability to reset the epigenome to a more youthful state.

Life Bio calls its approach partial epigenetic reprogramming, and its clinical trial will be the first to test the concept in humans, Ryan reported. The approach is similar to a Nobel Prize-winning lab technique that can turn adult cells into blank-slate stem cells, but Life Bio’s therapy intentionally stops short of that full rollback. Since the FDA doesn’t recognize aging itself as a disease, the company’s Phase 1 trial will test its gene therapy in two forms of vision loss. 

The bold approach may garner some skepticism. The anti-aging field has long been mired in audacious claims and drugs with fuzzy mechanisms. But Sinclair remains bullish about the therapy and believes the vision loss study will provide clear-cut evidence on whether partial epigenetic reprogramming is effective.

🇨🇳Biotechs from China are catching up fast to their Western counterparts. No company embodies this acceleration more than Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, news reporter Lei Lei Wu wrote this week. Often shortened to Hengrui, the company was once virtually unknown outside China. Now, its market cap of $61 billion-plus ranks it among the top 25 pharma companies in the world, more than Takeda and Bayer.

How did Hengrui get here? The company started over 50 years ago as a generic drugmaker, but began focusing on developing its own drugs within the last two decades or so. Currently, Hengrui has more than 100 experimental treatments being studied across some 400-plus clinical trials. That speed, particularly in the early stages of drug development, has become a hallmark of China biotech’s rise, Lei Lei writes.
 

🤝Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 diabetes drug Trulicity and Gilead’s HIV drug Biktarvy are among 15 drugs selected for the third round of Medicare negotiations under the IRA. Click here to see our reporting on the full list. Drugs payable under Medicare Part B were included for the first time this year. Also for the first time, CMS has selected one additional drug for renegotiation: Boehringer Ingelheim’s diabetes drug Tradjenta. Drugmakers have until Feb. 28 to opt into negotiations, which will take effect in 2028.

Meanwhile, the pharma industry’s court battle is heating up. AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, Novartis and Boehringer Ingelheim have asked the high court to review their IRA challenges. Drugmakers and the industry trade group PhRMA have brought a range of constitutional and statutory challenges. But so far, drugmakers have lost every case where a court has ruled on the merits, with just a handful of cases pending in the lower courts.

💰AstraZeneca will invest $15 billion to bolster manufacturing of medicines and ramp up R&D in China through 2030, the company announced this week. The investment was announced as a delegation of dozens of business executives and UK leaders, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, visited China this week.