👋 Good morning! Another day, another NIH leader heading for the exit. If it feels like you just read this headline last week, it’s because you did. If the NIH were a startup, the board would be asking some uncomfortable questions.

Gary Gibbons, MD, is retiring as director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute after leading the institute since 2012. His exit pushes the total to 15 of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers now operating under interim leadership.

NHLBI is not some sleepy corner of the agency. Under Gibbons, it backed major advances in sickle cell disease and helped reshape cardiovascular care through landmark blood pressure trials. Starting January 31, David Goff, MD, PhD, will step in as acting director while the search for a permanent replacement begins.

This comes just two weeks after the NIH declined to reappoint longtime NINDS director Walter Koroshetz. Two exits. Two major institutes.

Interim leadership works in emergencies. It gets dicey when it becomes the default. For an agency that sets the tone for U.S. biomedical research, the bench is starting to look uncomfortably thin.

💊 Lilly’s Obesity Pill Could Get FDA Approval as Soon as March
Eli Lilly says its oral obesity drug orforglipron could win FDA approval as early as March, thanks to a national priority voucher that may fast-track the review. CFO Luca Montarce dropped the updated timeline at JPM, cranking up the pressure on Novo Nordisk to lock in pill market share before Lilly shows up. Injectables built the GLP-1 market. Pills may decide who owns it.

🐒 Charles River Buys Its Way Out of the Primate Crunch
Charles River is paying $510 million to acquire a nonhuman primate supplier as it tries to stabilize a supply chain rattled since China’s export ban. The CRO is also spending $60 million to buy out the rest of PathoQuest, a sequencing-based alternative to animal testing. It’s a hedge in both directions. Secure animals when you need them, replace them when you can.

🤖 Thermo Fisher Brings Nvidia Into the Lab
Thermo Fisher kicked off JPM with two AI-flavored deals, including a partnership with Nvidia to build autonomous lab workflows. The plan involves Nvidia’s DGX Spark systems and aims to accelerate discovery while reducing manual bottlenecks. In parallel, TetraScience is integrating Thermo’s instruments and informatics to unlock more value from experimental data. The lab of the future is starting to look suspiciously like a data center.

💰 AbbVie Trades Lower Prices for Tariff Protection
AbbVie struck a White House deal to lower prices on certain drugs while committing $100 billion to U.S. R&D and manufacturing over the next decade. In return, the company secured exemptions from pharma import tariffs and future price mandates. Details are thin, but the strategy is clear. Pay now, avoid worse pain later.

✅ FDA Reverses Course on a Rare Disease Rejection
Just four months after a rejection, the FDA approved Sentynl and Cyprium’s Zycubo as the first U.S. treatment for Menkes disease. Two phase 3 trials did the trick. A reminder that in rare disease, persistence can sometimes beat perfection.

🐢 Novo Nordisk Slows the Expansion, Doubles Down on Execution
Novo says it will stop rushing into new indications and refocus on diabetes and obesity as its foundation. After losing U.S. GLP-1 momentum to Lilly, the company plans to reassert itself through tighter commercial execution, direct-to-patient expansion, and disciplined pipeline investments. Fewer side quests. More finishing the main mission.

✅ FDA Clears GLP-1 Suicide Warning Confusion
The agency asked Lilly and Novo to remove suicidal ideation warnings after finding no increased risk across the drug class.

⏳ Travere’s $2B Kidney Drug Gets a Three-Month FDA Delay
The Filspari decision was pushed to April, sending shares down 16% as a $2B indication stays in limbo.

🇨🇳 Novartis Snags a Peptide Radioligand From China
A $50M upfront deal gives Novartis worldwide rights to a peptide-based radioligand therapy.

🔥 Caldera Launches With $112.5M and a China-Licensed IBD Drug
The new biotech is advancing a bispecific antibody targeting IL-23 and TL1A pathways.

📈 Ionis Doubles Down on Tryngolza Sales Potential
Strong early launch data pushed peak sales guidance for its RNA drug to more than $2B.

🩸 Agios Sees $1B Plus Potential Across Two Mitapivat Drugs
Recent FDA approval for Aqvesme adds momentum to Agios’ rare blood disease portfolio.

🧬 Illumina Tries to Reopen the China Sales Channel
The sequencing giant says it’s working with Chinese officials to make progress on sales while U.S. academic demand stays muted under export restrictions and NIH budget cuts.

💸 Jazz Sells a Priority Review Voucher for $200M
PRV prices keep climbing, and buyers keep paying.

If you felt like early-stage biotech fundraising slowed to a crawl last year, that wasn’t just vibes.

J.P. Morgan’s latest biopharma report shows seed and Series A rounds dropped from 228 in 2024 to 191 in 2025, with total dollars falling from $10.6B to $8.7B. Meanwhile, later-stage rounds held up better, widening the gap between startups with data and those still building it.

The reason is simple. Diligence got stricter. Decision timelines got longer. And investors decided they would rather fund assets with clinical proof than bold preclinical promises. In 2025 alone, 80 venture rounds topped $100M, almost all of them backing de-risked programs.

Public markets followed the same script. IPOs slowed after an early burst, and the companies that did make it out were later-stage and modestly sized. With public exits harder to come by, value creation shifted toward licensing deals instead.

And pharma leaned in hard. Biopharma companies committed $252B to licensing in 2025, up from $190.6B the year before. Upfront payments skewed heavily toward late-stage assets, with Phase III programs averaging $185M upfront, compared with just $53M the year prior.

There are early signs of life in 2026, but the message is clear. Capital is still flowing. It’s just flowing toward certainty. For early-stage biotechs, the bar did not lower. It moved higher.

This is the five-year survival rate for all cancers in the U.S., the highest ever recorded. According to the American Cancer Society, progress is being driven by lower smoking rates, earlier detection, and more effective therapies. In the 1970s, only half of patients lived five years after diagnosis. The concern now is whether funding pressures could slow the next wave of gains.

Here’s what biotech Redditors had to say this week:

🤖 Is the Lilly–Nvidia AI Bet Actually Useful?
Some biotech professionals see the $1B AI drug discovery partnership as a long-overdue fix for years of wasted early research. Others argue discovery isn’t the bottleneck at all and that clinical trials remain the real failure point. The middle ground view is gaining traction. Better discovery may not solve everything, but it could mean fewer doomed molecules ever reach the clinic.

😤 Why Is QA Always So Grumpy?
One Redditor asked if QA teams everywhere communicate exclusively via passive-aggressive emails. The consensus answer was surprisingly empathetic. QA absorbs pressure from every department, says “no” more than anyone else, and rarely gets credit when things go right. The most practical advice offered? Lead with kindness. And maybe bring coffee.

🤝 AstraZeneca Buys Its AI Partner Modella
The pharma is acquiring Modella AI to scale multimodal foundation models across oncology R&D.

🤖 Anthropic Launches Claude for Healthcare
The AI platform joins OpenAI in targeting providers, payers, and patient-facing tools.

🌱 A VC Fund Focused on Biodiversity Raises $25.9M
Superorganism is betting that conservation belongs on the cap table.

😮‍💨 A Necklace That Tracks Blood Sugar via Breath
PreEvnt’s Isaac device uses breath acetone to estimate glucose levels without needles.

🦾 Converge Bio Uses Generative AI to Speed Drug Discovery
The Boston and Tel Aviv startup raised a $25M oversubscribed Series A to train generative models on DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. Instead of bolting AI onto workflows, Converge plugs directly into them. The goal is fewer dead ends and faster paths to viable drugs.

🍯 January 15, 1919 – The Great Molasses Flood
A tank holding 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst in Boston, sending a 35 mph wave through the North End, killing 21 and injuring 150. Locals claimed the neighborhood smelled like molasses for decades.

That’s it for today. A surprisingly quiet news week considering JPM is still underway. Maybe everyone front-loaded their announcements. Or maybe they’re saving the chaos for later. Today is the final day of the conference, so if anything big breaks, we’ll catch it in Tuesday’s issue.

Until then, enjoy your molasses-free commute and let’s hope the NIH finds a few permanent directors soon.

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