👋 Good morning! You know that feeling when you walk into class, see a substitute at the front of the room, and immediately realize nothing important is getting done today?

That’s basically the NIH right now.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) just lost its director, Walter Koroshetz, after the agency declined to reappoint him. His exit means 14 of the NIH’s 27 institutes are now run by interim leadership.

That’s not a transition plan. That’s a vibe shift.

Neurology groups are not thrilled. The American Academy of Neurology called out the lack of consultation and the absence of a clear succession plan, noting that NINDS plays a central role in funding and directing brain research nationwide.

Interim leadership can keep the lights on, but it does not inspire long-term bets. And in an ecosystem that lives on confidence, uncertainty spreads fast.

💰 Novo Nordisk Puts GLP-1 Weight Loss Pill on the Store Shelf
On Monday, Novo Nordisk officially rolled out the first oral GLP-1 for weight loss in the U.S., making Wegovy pills available across more than 700,000 pharmacies and telehealth providers. The starting cash price lands at $149 per month, undercutting injectables and dropping as low as $25 with insurance. A needle-free option lowers friction for millions who stayed on the sidelines. The bigger story is adoption, with oral delivery acting as an accelerant in a market barreling toward $150B by 2035. Eli Lilly is watching closely as it races toward its own oral contender.

🧪 Sanofi Doubles Down on AI Autoimmune Discovery
Sanofi is back at the table with Earendil Labs, committing $160M upfront and near-term milestones to apply AI-driven discovery to autoimmune bispecific antibodies. If everything hits, the collaboration could reach $2.56B in total value. Sanofi will handle development and commercialization while Earendil feeds the pipeline. This move reinforces Sanofi’s quiet strategy of stacking AI-enabled immunology assets rather than chasing one-off moonshots.

🧬 AbbVie Joins the Trispecific Arms Race
AbbVie paid $100M upfront to China-based Zejing for an ex-China option on a DLL3-targeting trispecific T-cell binder for lung cancer. Another $60M follows if AbbVie exercises the option, with milestones pushing total value past $1B. The asset is already in late-stage trials, shortening timelines and lowering risk. Trispecifics are no longer experimental flexes. They are becoming required gear in oncology pipelines.

🤖 Insilico Turns IPO Momentum Into Pharma Money
Fresh off its Hong Kong IPO, Insilico Medicine signed an oncology R&D partnership with Servier valued at up to $888M. Insilico will lead AI-driven discovery while Servier shares development costs and takes over later-stage work. The timing matters. Raising public capital and immediately validating the platform with Big Pharma cash is how you keep post-IPO gravity working in your favor.

💊 FDA Approval Ends a 40-Year Motion Sickness Drought
The FDA approved Vanda Pharmaceuticals’ Nereus for motion-induced vomiting, marking the first new drug for motion sickness in more than four decades. Approval was supported by three phase 3 trials, including two conducted on boats. The drug previously failed in gastroparesis but found its footing at sea… Guess it’s time to book that deep sea fishing trip. 🎣

🧯 J&J Cuts a $1.2B Asset Loose
Johnson and Johnson scrapped its IL-4 and IL-31 eczema program after an interim analysis failed to clear internal efficacy thresholds. The asset was acquired from Numab for $1.25B in 2024 and barely survived a year in development. The takeaway is blunt. Even Big Pharma is no longer sentimental about sunk costs.

🧪 Zenas BioPharma Misses the Market Despite a Win
Zenas hit its phase 3 primary endpoint but still saw shares fall 52 percent as investors stacked its data against Amgen’s higher bar.

💰 Aktis Oncology Lines Up a Potential 2026 IPO
Aktis is preparing what could be the first biotech IPO of 2026, targeting up to $209M with heavyweight pharma investors already on the cap table.

🧬 Gilead Adds a Polθ Inhibitor for Cheap
Gilead paid $25M upfront for Repare’s Polθ inhibitor, a tidy bolt-on that boosted Repare’s valuation ahead of its acquisition close.

🏭 Daiichi Sankyo Spends Big to De-Risk Enhertu Supply
Daiichi is investing $1.9B to expand ADC manufacturing across Japan, the U.S., Germany, and China to hedge both demand and geopolitics.

🇨🇳 ASK Pharm Locks Down China RAS Rights
ASK licensed China rights to a preclinical pan-RAS inhibitor in a deal worth up to $230M, underscoring continued China-linked deal flow.

📉 Corcept Loses Half Its Value on an FDA No
Despite hitting its primary endpoint, Corcept received a complete response letter for its Cushing’s drug and watched its market cap get cut in half.

👁️ Outlook Therapeutics Strikes Out Again
Outlook’s wet AMD filing was rejected for the third time, sending shares down more than 60 percent in premarket trading.

Boston built its reputation as the safest place in biotech to find opportunity. Dense clusters of startups, a steady venture capital flywheel, and an academic pipeline that fed industry year after year.

That assumption is breaking down.

Job openings across Boston-area biotech have thinned dramatically, even as the supply of highly trained scientists remains high. PhDs are applying to dozens or hundreds of roles without callbacks. Senior scientists are competing for positions that once would have been considered transitional. Many are leaving the region altogether.

The causes are layered.

First, companies are shrinking or shutting down. Biogen has cut hundreds of roles locally. Moderna reduced headcount as its COVID-era growth normalized. Thermo Fisher, Bluebird Bio, Sarepta, Sage, and multiple mid-cap oncology and cell therapy players have downsized or exited programs entirely. When capital-intensive science stalls, Boston feels it first.

Second, venture capital has pulled back. Rising interest rates pushed investors away from long-duration, high-burn biology and toward AI, platform-light models, or later-stage assets. Early-stage Boston startups that would have raised Series A rounds in 2021 are now stuck in prolonged seed purgatory or quietly winding down.

Third, the political and regulatory landscape has added friction. NIH and FDA leadership instability, slower grant and FDA review cycles, and political uncertainty have made both public and private funding less predictable. Companies respond by delaying hiring or freezing expansion altogether.

The result is visible in the real estate data. Nearly 28 percent of Boston-area lab space is now vacant. That is not just a property problem. It is a signal that future hiring is already priced lower.

What could turn this around?

Stability more than stimulus. Lower interest rates would help reopen the VC spigot. Clear NIH leadership and predictable federal funding would restore confidence in long-term research bets. And a new wave of platform-defining breakthroughs, whether in obesity, oncology, or AI-enabled drug discovery, could pull capital back toward wet lab science.

Boston does not need another boom to survive. But without a reset in funding confidence, the region risks drifting from global biotech engine to legacy hub living off its past wins.

That’s how many novel drugs the FDA approved in 2025.

It’s down from 55 in 2023 and 50 in 2024, with fewer expected blockbuster launches in the mix. Leadership turnover, inspection backlogs, and staffing instability are not the only factors, but they are showing up in the numbers. A late-year approval surge softened the optics, but the trend is hard to ignore.

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

• “Is biotech hiring cooked or am I missing something?”
One recent PhD grad laid it out bluntly: most non-academic job listings want AI/ML expertise, skills that barely existed when they started their degree. The responses were equal parts practical and existential. One commenter noted that in wet-lab roles you generally don’t need hardcore AI, but bioinformatics teams are starting to treat AI fluency as table stakes. Another chimed in with a reality check: for many positions it’s less about formal ML credentials and more about showing you can use tools like ChatGPT to speed up workflows while respecting confidentiality rules. The broader vibe? Biotech talent pipelines are still adjusting to the AI era, and candidates feel squeezed between their PhD training and a rapidly shifting job market.

• “Is biotech dominance shifting to China?”
The consensus answer was nuanced. China is fast, capital-efficient, and excellent at improving de-risked targets. Discovery innovation still favors the U.S., but deal flow suggests the gap is narrowing. For job seekers, overseas opportunities are no longer fringe options.

🧠 Neuralink Preps for High-Volume Production
Elon Musks’ Neuralink plans to move into scaled manufacturing in 2026 with a more automated surgical workflow.

🥗 Abbott Adds AI to Glucose Decision-Making
Abbott launched Libre Assist, an AI feature that predicts glucose response to meals using CGM data.

🧬 Breast Cancer Keeps the Research Crown
Breast cancer remained the most studied disease for the fifth straight year, with the top five indications unchanged.

🩸 Biobeat Raises $50M for Cuffless Blood Pressure Monitoring
Biobeat (not an EDM group 😂) secured new funding to scale its patch-based, continuous blood pressure technology.

🧪 Glengarry Brain Health Targets Alzheimer’s Metabolism
Case Western–backed startup, Glengarry Brain Health, is advancing a compound that restored cellular energy and reversed Alzheimer’s symptoms in mouse models. The therapy improved memory, reduced anxiety, and worked across amyloid- and tau-driven disease. Early data suggests metabolic restoration could emerge as a serious therapeutic angle.

❤️ January 6, 1968 — Stanford surgeons performed the first adult heart transplant in the U.S., proving that what once sounded impossible could become standard practice. Biotech has been chasing that feeling ever since.

That’s it for today. We’ll see you Thursday. 👋

May your job hunt be short, your layoffs be theoretical, and your LinkedIn inbox unexpectedly useful.

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