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Women in Biopharma 2026 |
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👩🔬This year’s honorees were behind some of the biggest headlines of 2026, including the biotech industry’s largest public offering and an approval that changed how pancreatic cancer is treated. They’ve made breakthrough discoveries in gene therapy, launched blockbuster drugs and fought for access to women’s health treatments. While women remain vastly underrepresented in the upper ranks of the biopharma industry, this year’s class is leading the change. About 12% of life sciences companies are led by women, according to an Endpoints News analysis of 632 publicly traded companies. That’s up from 8.3% in 2019, the year we started our annual Women in Biopharma project. You can meet our 2026 honorees here. |
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A secretive new thorn in pharma’s side |
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💊Who is behind the Pharmaceutical Reform Alliance? It’s a question senior reporter Max Bayer spent some time asking folks in Washington, DC, this week. What we do know is the group is almost two years old and pushing for legislation focused on lowering the price of drugs. But who the group actually represents — in other words, who pays for it to exist — is unclear. No one affiliated with the organization will say publicly
who the group’s financial backers are.
Despite the secrecy, research partly funded by the group was published in JAMA late last month, in which academics tracked drug launch prices before and after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. The group also commissioned a voter survey on codifying “most favored nation” drug pricing by a pollster that has worked for President Donald Trump. The group’s apparent function is to lay blame squarely at the feet of the pharmaceutical industry for the high price of drugs, and to remind lawmakers of that.
With the midterm elections less than a month away, and signs pointing to Democrats taking at least one chamber of Congress, there could be an opportunity for the PRA to continue pressing the issue on drug pricing. Read more from Max here. |
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Genentech parts ways with AI leader |
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🖥️Computational biologist Richard Bonneau has left Roche’s Genentech unit, Endpoints learned this week. Bonneau was a co-founder of Prescient Design, the AI startup acquired by Genentech in 2021. That group has played a significant role in research and early development chief Aviv Regev’s plans to reshape Genentech’s labs with AI. Reporter Andrew Dunn called the deal an acquihire, intended to bring top-tier AI talent like Bonneau and his co-founders, Kyunghyun Cho and Vladimir Gligorijević, into Genentech. But the group has seen a steady trickle of departures over the past year. You can read more here. |
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MimiVax’s brain cancer treatment falls short |
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🧠A brain cancer effort more than a decade in the making culminated in a disappointing study result this week. But the researchers behind it say there’s enough of a promising signal to give certain patients with the deadly disease a new treatment option. The trial comes from a biotech called MimiVax, which said its cancer vaccine for glioblastoma just missed the primary endpoint in a Phase 2b study in patients with a new diagnosis.
The addition of the cancer vaccine, called SurVaxM, led to a median overall survival of 22.8 months, compared to 20.3 months with placebo. The difference was not statistically significant. But in patients 65 and younger, MimiVax reported a more substantial survival benefit, as patients lived for a median 24.2 months, versus 20.2 months with placebo. The last major drug for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients came in 2005, Lei Lei Wu writes.
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AstraZeneca’s new R&D facility |
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🏙️Early this week, AstraZeneca inaugurated a 570,000-square-foot building in Cambridge, MA, that it says will soon employ 2,000 workers dedicated to R&D in cancer, cardiometabolic diseases and rare conditions. The event was celebratory of both the company and the Kendall Square neighborhood, where its presence will now rival that of Sanofi, Novartis and Google. Deputy Editor Karen Weintraub caught up with Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca’s head of oncology R&D, to discuss the opening. You can read their Q&A here. |
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