👋 Hey, let’s get into it. Moderna's flu vaccine story increasingly feels like a company laying someone off, only to call them a few weeks later and say, "So... funny story. Any chance you're free to start Monday?"

Earlier this year the company got hit with a surprise refuse-to-file letter signed by then-CBER chief Vinay Prasad, throwing its mRNA flu ambitions into confusion and leaving everyone wondering whether the FDA had suddenly shifted into a much tougher stance toward mRNA products.

Now the vaccine is heading straight into the FDA advisory committee arena on June 18. Same vaccine. Same company. Completely different energy.

May the odds be ever in their favor.

💉 Lilly's 28% Weight Loss Drug Rivals Bariatric Surgery
Eli Lilly's next-generation obesity drug just put up numbers that made the GLP-1 world do a double take. In a Phase 3 study, retatrutide helped patients lose 28.3% of body weight on average at the highest dose, or roughly 70 pounds over 80 weeks. Around 45% of patients achieved at least 30% weight loss, a threshold Lilly's own leadership said previously lived mostly in bariatric surgery territory. The so-called "triple G" drug targets GLP-1, GIP and glucagon simultaneously, giving it more levers to pull than today's therapies. Side effects climbed with higher doses, but lower doses showed much better tolerability.

💰 $21B Healthcare Investment Giant Forms Through GHO-CBC Merger
Healthcare investing apparently did not think it was big enough already. London-based GHO Capital and Singapore's CBC Group announced plans to merge into what they call the world's largest healthcare-focused investment manager with more than $21 billion under management. The combined firm will span pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, medical devices, life science tools, healthcare infrastructure and healthcare IT. Together they will have more than 200 professionals across 13 global offices covering regions responsible for roughly 90% of worldwide healthcare R&D spending.

💸 Medtronic Makes A $650M Move Into Non-Opioid Pain Therapy
Medtronic agreed to acquire SPR Therapeutics for roughly $650 million in cash, adding its SPRINT peripheral nerve stimulation platform to the company's pain portfolio. The system uses a tiny implanted wire connected to an external pulse generator that stimulates targeted nerves for up to 60 days before removal. For Medtronic, the deal fills a gap between conservative treatments and permanent implants. For patients, it offers another attempt to avoid the familiar healthcare progression of "have you tried physical therapy?" immediately followed by "have you considered surgery?"

✅ AstraZeneca & Daiichi Win Breast Cancer Approval With Datroway's 21% Survival Advantage
The TROP2 rivalry just got more interesting. AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo's Datroway won FDA approval in first-line triple-negative breast cancer for patients not eligible for PD-1/L1 treatments. The drug reduced risk of death by 21% versus chemotherapy and extended median overall survival by five months to nearly 24 months. The approval also lands with convenient timing because rival TROP2 drug Trodelvy recently missed statistical significance on overall survival in a similar setting. Cross-trial comparisons are messy, but AstraZeneca and Daiichi probably aren’t complaining.

🙌 Merck's ADC Combo Cuts Cancer Progression Risk By 65%
Merck and Kelun's sac-TMT plus Keytruda combination reduced progression or death risk by 65% in first-line lung cancer.

💰 Recordati Draws A $12.4B Buyout Offer
Private equity firms offered a 13% premium to take Recordati private and potentially give the drugmaker more strategic flexibility.

🧬 Lilly's Gene Editor Cuts Cholesterol By 62%
Lilly's one-time VERVE-102 program lowered cholesterol by 62%, producing reductions approaching existing PCSK9 inhibitors without ongoing repeat treatment.

💊 Europe Could Get Its First Oral GLP-1 for Obesity
Novo's Wegovy tablet moved closer toward approval in Europe and could expand obesity treatment beyond injections for many patients.

💵 Liminatus Swaps $320M In Stock For CAR-T Assets
Liminatus agreed to buy InnocsAI in a stock deal designed to strengthen its oncology pipeline and future clinical prospects.

🏆 BioMarin Finds A Much Needed Win
BioMarin reported stronger-than-expected Phase 3 growth data for Voxzogo after recent setbacks rattled confidence around its rare disease pipeline.

👍 AstraZeneca’s Breast Cancer Drug Gets Thumbs Up in Europe
Just weeks after an FDA rejection vote, European regulators endorsed AstraZeneca's camizestrant for certain advanced breast cancer patients.

You can already bet on elections, sports, and whether humanity will discover aliens (no joke). Naturally, biotech looked at that list and thought: you know what this needs? Phase 2 trial outcomes.

Prediction markets are now creeping into biotech. Platforms like Kalshi have started listing contracts tied to drug milestones, letting users wager on things like whether a company will submit an application or receive FDA approval by a certain date. A newer platform called Endpoint Arena is taking things even further by focusing specifically on clinical trials. For now it's paper trading only, but the idea is simple: users make predictions on whether studies will hit their endpoints in ongoing trials.

Supporters think this could actually help science. Instead of stock prices bouncing around for twenty different reasons at once, prediction markets isolate a single event and force people to think critically about it…as all gamblers do. 🙃

Endpoint Arena's CEO argues that markets can reward expertise and potentially surface useful signals earlier. The theory is that if enough informed people independently arrive at similar conclusions, those patterns might help identify promising therapies or shape better study designs. The pitch basically sounds like: what if Wall Street and peer review had a child?

Critics, however, see some giant flashing warning signs. Clinical trials are not football games. If patients see terrible odds attached to a study, maybe enrollment drops. Smaller biotechs already live on funding tightropes, and public sentiment alone can create problems. Then there is the uncomfortable insider information question. If betting on a trial outcome creates a financial incentive for someone with access to nonpublic data, things can get messy fast.

Right now this market is tiny. Less than $50,000 is reportedly sitting across biotech-related contracts on Kalshi, and Endpoint Arena remains in pilot mode. But biotech has a long history of taking weird ideas seriously. Sometimes they become billion-dollar industries. Sometimes they become cautionary tales. The weird part here is figuring out whether science should simply be predicted...or whether prediction itself starts influencing the science.

This is the number of top-25 biopharma companies that posted double-digit year-over-year revenue growth during the first quarter of 2026. That's up from six companies across each quarter of last year. Lilly kept acting like Lilly with a 56% jump, while names including Regeneron, AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Daiichi also joined the party.

Here’s what biotech Redditors are talking about:

😵 600+ Applications. 8 On-Sites. 1 Offer. 45% Less Pay.
A Redditor posted a literal flowchart documenting a 16-month biotech job search that ended with one offer and a salary cut approaching half their previous pay. The discussion quickly shifted from one person's experience into a broader reality check on the market. Some commenters looked at a biochemistry PhD plus four years of biologics experience and essentially said, if this person struggled for 16 months, what chance do the rest of us have? Others argued that startup experience and large pharma experience are still viewed differently by hiring managers, fair or not. The mood across the thread was somewhere between empathy and existential crisis.

🔬 M.S. Degree, 4 Years Of Experience, And Still Feeling Like "The Pair Of Hands"
Another Redditor described taking a lower-level role after a layoff and feeling increasingly boxed in despite previous experience designing experiments and leading workstreams. The discussion quickly evolved into a familiar industry debate: is there an invisible ceiling for non-PhD scientists? Some people argued that moving toward project management, commercial roles, or customer-facing positions made more sense long term. Others were more direct and said biotech R&D carries a strong PhD bias and without one you’ll find the ceiling fast.

🦠 US Government Taps Tiny Biotech For Ebola Response
Mapp Biopharmaceutical shipped experimental antibody doses as health officials respond to a worsening Ebola outbreak in central Africa.

🇨🇦 Hims Brings Generic Semaglutide To Canada
Hims & Hers expanded its GLP-1 business north of the border with generic semaglutide now available through its platform.

🌍 Gilead Donates 400K Treatments For A Neglected Disease
Gilead pledged more than 400,000 AmBisome doses plus additional funding to help eliminate visceral leishmaniasis.

🫁 Oorja Launches With $30M To Reverse Lung Scarring
Some biotech startups emerge from stealth with AI slides and ambitious promises. Oorja showed up carrying a clinical-stage fibrosis program and $30 million in funding. Led by Acceleron veterans, the company is targeting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis with ORJ-001, a peptide therapy designed to restore repair functions in specialized lung cells called AEC2 cells. Instead of simply slowing disease progression, the company believes its approach could potentially reverse lung scarring itself.

🌼 May 26, 1669: Sébastien Vaillant Is Born
French botanist Sébastien Vaillant entered the world on this day in 1669 and later became famous for making an unexpectedly spicy contribution to botany. Vaillant argued that flowers possessed male and female reproductive structures, with stamens acting as male organs and pistils functioning as female structures. Today that sounds like middle-school biology. Back then it sounded controversial enough to make people shift awkwardly in their seats before eventually realizing he was right.

One can imagine Vaillant standing in front of a crowd explaining that flowers have male and female reproductive parts while everyone slowly avoids eye contact. It feels like the historical equivalent of a gym teacher reluctantly opening the sex-ed PowerPoint and immediately regretting every career choice.

That’s all for today. See you Thursday for the next issue. 👋

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