👋 Hey, let’s get into it. After Lilly’s blowout quarter, Novo had a tough act to follow when they reported earnings on Wednesday. But they absolutely delivered.

Q3 revenue hit $11.9 billion, up 4% from the same quarter last year. The Wegovy pill brought in about $810 million, up 53% from the previous quarter. Novo beat Wall Street’s expectations and raised its full-year outlook.

Novo now expects −2% to +2% growth in adjusted sales and operating profit, up from −6% to 0%.

We know what you’re thinking. Since when is roughly flat growth worth celebrating? Well, when you’ve spent most of the year on defense and a 6% decline was on the table, a shot at 2% growth starts to feel like you’re totally crushing it.

🧾 CVS Plans to Split Into Two Public Companies
Here’s how CVS wants to divide things up. One company would get roughly 9,000 retail pharmacies, the mail pharmacy and MinuteClinic. The other would keep Aetna, Caremark and CVS Specialty, so it could still insure patients, manage their drug benefits and fill specialty prescriptions. CVS is aiming to split in the first half of 2028. Drugmakers will be watching what happens when the two companies sit on opposite sides of the negotiating table. And if CVS is looking to save a little money, our model suggests capping receipts at two feet per transaction.

💰 Boehringer Bets Up to $7.36B on Six Sino Biopharma Cancer Programs
Boehringer Ingelheim is betting on six preclinical cancer programs from Sino Biopharmaceutical, with $358 million in upfront and near-term payments and up to $7 billion more in option fees and milestones, plus royalties. The programs use two different tactics. Antibody-drug conjugates deliver a drug payload to cells, while T-cell engagers bring immune cells face to face with cancer cells. Sino will advance the programs toward agreed clinical milestones before Boehringer decides which licenses to take. For Boehringer, the deal buys time to see how the science holds up before committing to individual programs.

🏭 Lonza Agrees to Buy Merck KGaA’s Drug Manufacturing Business
Lonza signed a deal to buy Merck KGaA’s CDMO business, which would take its US network from four sites to nine and bring over about 1,100 employees. The deal gives drugmakers a bigger Lonza network for work like attaching payloads to antibodies and filling and packaging viral vector therapies. Merck KGaA, the German company, is keeping its BioReliance contract testing business. Lonza put the deal’s enterprise value in the low to mid hundreds of millions of Swiss francs and expects it to close in mid-2027.

💊 AbbVie Licenses IBD Pill in Deal Worth Up to $1.47B
AbbVie agreed to license worldwide rights to an experimental pill for inflammatory bowel disease from Nxera Pharma. The $100 million upfront payment could be followed by up to $1.37 billion in milestones, plus royalties. The pill is designed to switch on a receptor called EP4 in the gut, with the aim of easing inflammation and helping repair the intestinal lining. That barrier repair angle gives AbbVie a different approach to IBD. Phase 1 work is complete, and the next question is whether the pill can improve symptoms or help patients reach remission.

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🧬 FDA Grants Priority Review to uniQure’s Huntington’s Gene Therapy
The FDA accepted uniQure’s accelerated approval application for AMT-130, its Huntington’s disease gene therapy candidate, with a target decision date of May 1, 2027.

✂️ Pfizer Drops Seven Programs and Raises Revenue Guidance
Pfizer raised its 2026 revenue forecast to $62–64 billion and reported seven program cuts since August, including a Phase 2 candidate for pulmonary arterial hypertension.

🥶 Novartis Scraps $800M BioArctic Deal After 14 Months
Novartis ended its collaboration on technology designed to ferry antibodies into the brain, and BioArctic gets to keep the $30 million upfront payment.

⚖️ Rezdiffra Tops $1B as Madrigal Disputes Whistleblower Allegations
Madrigal reported $1.1 billion in year-to-date Rezdiffra sales while disputing a former executive’s allegations about the drug’s liver safety reporting and clinical data practices.

💵 Teva Lands US Rights to Two Biosimilars in Up to $420M Deal
Teva will pay Samsung Bioepis $50 million upfront, plus up to $370 million in milestones, for US rights to FDA-approved biosimilars of Remicade and Enbrel.

🎟️ Egetis Agrees to Sell FDA Priority Review Voucher for $190M
Egetis earned the voucher when the FDA approved Emcitate and owes half the net proceeds to the former owners of Rare Thyroid Therapeutics.

🇬🇧 AbbVie Expands Oxford R&D Site as Part of $161M UK Investment
AbbVie’s new 12,000 square foot Oxford site expands its research in immunology, neuroscience, and oncology as part of a broader UK investment worth about $161 million (£120M).

👁️ ASKA Licenses Thyroid Eye Disease Drug for Japan in Up to $440M Deal
ASKA will pay Minghui $110 million upfront, plus up to $330 million in milestones and royalties on Japanese sales, for its Phase 3 injectable antibody.

Democrats won both chambers of Congress on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, Novo CEO Mike Doustdar sounded like he was ready to get back to selling Wegovy. If you expected drugmakers to spend the morning tearing up their forecasts, the earnings calls were surprisingly uneventful.

That’s partly because pharma already knows what some of the biggest pricing changes will look like. Medicare’s negotiated prices for 15 drugs take effect in January, with another round coming in 2028. Novo and Pfizer have also factored in their own pricing deals with the Trump administration, which tied drug pricing commitments to tariff relief. Tuesday’s results didn’t change those numbers.

Could Democrats change them? It’ll be hard to pass a sweeping new pricing law while Trump still has veto power. But Congress can ask how the administration made those deals in the first place. Committees can request documents, call executives to testify and press officials on what drugmakers promised in exchange for tariff relief. Imagine having to explain a deal you struck behind closed doors on live television…Awkward.

Analysts at Leerink Partners expect Democrats to tackle other issues first, though they still see room for drug pricing investigations. They also flagged that the Trump administration itself could push for better terms in 2028. So for now, pharma executives may have more reason to keep a morning free for a hearing than to rewrite their sales forecasts.

As for Big Tech, somebody should probably tell those guys to move their laptops a little farther up the beach.

Ultragenyx plans to cut this much of its workforce, leaving the company with roughly 1,000 employees. It also expects to spend less than $350 million on R&D in 2027, about half what it spent in 2025, as it winds down programs for Angelman syndrome and Wilson disease.

Here’s what biotech Redditors are talking about:

🥼 Would You Take $70–$85 an Hour for Marathon Cleanroom Shifts?
A Redditor who says they manage a four-person cleanroom team put base pay at $70 to $85 an hour, plus plenty of overtime. The catch? They’re so understaffed that some stretches in the cleanroom run past ten hours with few chances to step out. Some Redditors wanted the application link. Others wanted an inspection and wondered how the setup would pass one. At that point, the first interview question might as well be “Can you go ten hours without a bathroom break?”

📬 One Lab Job, More Than 700 Applications
A Redditor says a lab opening drew more than 700 applications, compared with 10 to 20 for similar roles in the past. Some wondered how many people hit apply without reading the job description, or had a bot do it for them. Other hiring managers chimed in with similar stories, with one estimating only about 10% of applicants were qualified and suspected bots accounted for much of the rest. Meanwhile, experienced candidates said they’re struggling just to get an interview. Seven hundred applications, and somewhere a screening tool is still holding out for a slightly different keyword.

🩸 Cyberattack Hits French Blood Bank Refrigeration Systems
Attackers changed refrigeration settings at three French blood service sites, but alarms helped staff protect supplies, and officials reported no known health impacts.

🦠 New York Reports First Measles-Associated Death in More Than 30 Years
Health officials reported that a child in Lewis County died in connection with a measles outbreak, the state’s first measles-associated death in over three decades.

🤖 nPhase Raises $30 Million for AI-Assisted Clinical Data Work
Viking Global Investors led the Series D. nPhase will use the funding to expand its platform for analyzing clinical trial data and preparing regulatory submissions.

🧬 Specific Biologics Raises $35M for ALS Gene Editing
Toronto’s Specific Biologics raised $35 million in a Series A led by Hatteras Venture Partners. In one genetic form of ALS, a short stretch of DNA in the C9ORF72 gene repeats too many times. The startup’s Dualase editor is designed to shorten that stretch and fit inside a single viral delivery vehicle. The money will help fund the first group in a planned Phase 1/2 trial, where researchers will look for early biological signs that the editor is doing what it’s designed to do.

🦠 November 5, 2020: Bacteria Take Away a Virus’s Factory
On this day in 2020, a paper published online in Cell showed that retrons, bits of bacterial machinery that make DNA from RNA, can help defend against viruses. In one system, when a virus interfered with a separate bacterial defense, the infected cell died before the virus could use it to make more copies. The colony loses a cell. The virus loses its factory. Researchers later put that DNA-making machinery to work in experiments that use retrons to supply templates for gene editing.

When CVS splits into two companies, I hope shareholders get a receipt. The last time I bought a pack of gum at CVS, the receipt was 2.3 feet long. Extrapolating from that one transaction, I estimate the receipt for splitting the company will run about 238,855 miles. Roughly the distance from Earth to the Moon.

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

✍️ Today’s email was brought to you by Josh Martin. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

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