Biotech & Longevity · Thursday, 17 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Measles has killed more than 1,000 children in Bangladesh, and 83% of confirmed cases never had the vaccine

Biotech & Longevity 24 sources

Bangladesh has counted more than 194,000 measles cases since March, more than any other country this year. The WHO calls the emergency vaccination campaign a success; a public health expert says it missed too many children, and eight more people died with suspected measles on Tuesday.

194,000+

measles cases counted in Bangladesh since March

more than any other country so far this year, on the WHO's figures [1]

83%

of confirmed cases were in people who had never been vaccinated

a further 10% were babies under six months, too young for the shot [1]

97%

of infections are prevented by two doses of the measles vaccine

the doses are usually given at 12 to 15 months and again at four to six years [2]

76% of adults

in the United States call the measles shot safe for children

down from 84% in the same poll in May 2020 [2]

The lead story — what happened

Measles has killed more than 1,000 children in Bangladesh since the outbreak surged in March. [1]
Bangladesh's government counts more than 194,000 cases since March, and figures from the WHO, the United Nations health agency, make that more than any other country this year. [1]
Eight more people died with suspected measles on Tuesday alone. [1]
Until March the WHO described Bangladesh as making substantial progress towards getting rid of measles altogether. [1]
About 83% of confirmed cases were in people who had never been vaccinated. Another 10% were babies under six months, too young for the shot. [1]
Unicef, the United Nations children's agency, says the interim government that took over after Bangladesh's protests of 2024 delayed ordering vaccines last year while it considered new suppliers. Bangladesh's former top health official denies there was any shortage. [1]
Mushtuq Husain, a public health expert, says the emergency campaign left too many children unprotected and should have covered more regions and more age groups. [1]
He says health workers needed to go door to door to make families understand the urgency. [1]
The WHO calls the campaign a success, and says some target children were not reached because the virus had already spread nationwide before the vaccination drive began. [1]
Malnutrition raises the chance that measles turns into serious complications or death. [1]
In June Bangladesh's health minister said the challenge had already been met; about 300 more children have died since then. [1]
Measles is spreading in rich countries too. The United Kingdom lost its measles-free status this year, and the United States has recorded more than 3,000 cases, its most in 35 years. [1][2]

Who is involved

The WHO

the United Nations health agency; it calls Bangladesh's campaign a success while admitting some children were never reached
Unicef

the United Nations children's agency; it says Bangladesh delayed ordering vaccines last year while looking at new suppliers
Mushtuq Husain

a public health expert quoted by the BBC; he says the campaign missed regions and age groups and needed door-to-door work
Bangladesh's health ministry

the department that runs vaccination in Bangladesh; its minister said in June that the challenge had been met

How it unfolded

2024 student-led protests topple Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and an interim government takes over [1]
Last year Unicef says vaccine orders are delayed while new suppliers are considered [1]
March measles surges; before this the WHO had called Bangladesh's progress substantial [1]
June one hospital runs at more than double capacity; the health minister says the challenge has been met [1]
Tuesday eight more people die with suspected measles, and the toll passes 1,000 children [1]

Where this points

Watch whether Bangladesh sends health workers into the districts and age groups the first campaign missed, and whether the daily count of deaths starts to fall.

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

Doubt about vaccines spreading High↑

The US medical research agency is preparing a clinic for people who believe a vaccine made them ill. [3] A poll of 1,143 US adults found 76% call the measles shot safe for children, against 84% in 2020. [2]

Big drugmakers cutting programmes Building↑

Novartis ended its ALS drug after a 251-person trial missed every measure it was set. [4] Novo, the Danish maker of Wegovy, cancelled a deal worth up to $285m for a once-a-month weight-loss injection. [7] Eli Lilly stopped an early obesity drug that did not meet its own bar. [8]

Money moving to delivery and data Building↑

Novartis paid $125m for a technology that carries large drug molecules into the brain. [5] The Mayo Clinic and Thermo Fisher set up a company to gather molecular data from people before they fall ill. [15] Samsung Biologics signed a $262m contract to manufacture another firm's medicines until 2033. [16]

Side effects found after approval Building↑

A team at the University of Pennsylvania read 400,000 posts and found period changes and chills that weight-loss drug labels do not list. [14] The planned US study of illness after vaccination has almost no healthy vaccinated people to compare its patients against. [3]

The rest of the day

19 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
A US clinic for people who say a vaccine hurt them

The United States National Institutes of Health, that country's main medical research agency, is preparing a research programme for people who believe a vaccine harmed them. It could open in mid-October in Bethesda, Maryland. [3] The study, called MOSAIC, would collect clinical and genetic data on people who developed lung or nerve problems after a vaccination, and would be run by the agency's own staff. [3] It was proposed last year by a US commission chaired by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary and a longtime critic of vaccines. [3]

Why it matters — A patient advocate who developed lasting symptoms after a COVID vaccination says the work should have happened years ago, and that being lumped in with anti-vaccine campaigners adds insult to injury. [3] A vaccine researcher at Vanderbilt University says she wants honest answers about side effects, and does not want people who know nothing about science choosing which studies get funded. [3]
03
Novartis ends its ALS drug after a failed trial

Novartis, the Swiss drugmaker, has stopped developing VHB937 for ALS, the disease that destroys the nerve cells controlling movement, after a 251-person trial missed its main and secondary measures. [4] The drug was meant to stabilise a protein called TREM2 so that the brain's own immune cells protect nerve cells. [4] Two other companies' TREM2 drugs failed before it, in 2024 and last year. [4] Novartis is still testing the same molecule in Alzheimer's disease, where the evidence for the target is stronger. [4]

Why it matters — It lands in a bad few weeks for Novartis, which paused cell-therapy trials after three deaths and saw two late-stage drugs fail. [4] Analysts read the string of failures as pressure to buy growth from outside instead of growing it in its own labs. [4]
04
Novartis buys a way across the brain's barrier

Novartis will pay Sironax, a company near Boston, $125m for full ownership of its technology for carrying drugs into the brain. [5][6] The blood-brain barrier is a filter that keeps toxins out of the brain and keeps most large drug molecules out with them, which has blocked treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and ALS. [5][6] Novartis took an option on the platform 14 months ago and has now exercised it. [5] Sironax keeps the right to use the technology for three of its own early-stage drugs and will spend the money on them. [6]

Why it matters — Novartis has 14 neuroscience programmes and its own head of neuroscience says no single trick will solve the barrier, so it is buying a toolbox. [5] For Sironax, selling the platform pays for the medicines it wants to keep.
05
Novo drops a monthly weight-loss injection deal

Novo, the Danish maker of Wegovy, has terminated a partnership signed in November 2024 with Ascendis Pharma that was worth up to $285m in payments. [7] The lead project was a weight-loss injection given once a month instead of once a week, built on an Ascendis technology that links a drug to a carrier that lets go slowly. [7] Ascendis said on Monday it will now develop the monthly version of semaglutide, the ingredient in Wegovy, on its own. [7] Novo would not explain the decision. [7]

Why it matters — Novo lost a bidding war for a rival monthly drug last year and its pipeline is thin after two more trials of another drug were dropped. [7] A partner walking away leaves the smaller company holding both the cost and the upside.
06
Lilly stops an obesity drug at its first test

Eli Lilly has terminated the first human trial of LY4064912, an experimental obesity drug, after 77 volunteers, saying it did not meet the company's bar for going further. [8] The trial ran in California, Texas and Singapore and included both healthy people and people with obesity. [8] Lilly would not say how the drug was meant to work. [8] The company recently stopped publishing its list of early-stage projects at all, removing them from its website and its results. [8]

Why it matters — Lilly already leads the obesity market and has a triple-hormone drug that produced 22.6% weight loss in a late-stage trial, so the bar an early candidate must clear is set by its own products. [8]
07
J&J in talks to sell its joint implants

Johnson & Johnson is in talks to sell its orthopaedics business to the investment firm Apollo in a deal worth about $20bn, Bloomberg reported. [9] The unit makes hip, knee and shoulder implants and surgical instruments, and took $9.3bn in sales last year, barely above the $9.2bn of 2024. [9] J&J said last October it wanted to separate the business within 18 to 24 months. [9] It bought two of the businesses inside it for $21bn and $3.5bn, in 2011 and 1998. [9]

Why it matters — Novartis, Sanofi, GSK, Merck and Pfizer have all cut loose units that are not medicines. [9] A slow-growing implant business is worth more to a buyer that wants steady cash than to a drugmaker judged on new drugs.
08
An asthma drug misses, and the shares fall 35%

Connect Biopharma's drug rademikibart cut the rate of treatment failure by 66% over 28 days in a mid-stage asthma trial, but the result was not statistically significant, meaning it could have happened by chance. [11] The company said fewer patients got worse than it had expected, which left too few cases for the difference to count as real. [11] It pointed instead to a breathing test that did improve. [11] Its shares fell 35% to $1.12 on Tuesday morning. [11]

Why it matters — Results from the same drug in the lung disease COPD are due at the end of the month, and analysts asked whether those patients overlap with the ones just tested. [11] The drug aims at the same target as Dupixent, one of the biggest-selling medicines in the world.
09
AI read 400,000 posts for unlisted side effects

A University of Pennsylvania team used artificial intelligence to read more than 400,000 posts from nearly 70,000 people on Reddit, an online discussion site, about weight-loss and diabetes drugs including Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. [14] Nearly 4% of users mentioned changes to their periods, and many described chills and hot flushes, symptoms not prominent in the drugs' trials or official information. [14] The work was published in Nature Health. [14] The authors say it shows an association and cannot prove the drugs caused anything. [14]

Why it matters — Trials are built to catch the most dangerous effects in a few thousand people, so what bothers patients once millions take a drug arrives later and from the patients themselves. [14] One of the authors says online groups work like a neighbourhood grapevine: people swap notes with each other rather than telling a doctor or a regulator. [14]
10
Engineered gut bacteria protected mice from salmonella

Researchers at Virginia Tech engineered a harmless gut bacterium, E coli, to carry and release viruses that kill Salmonella Typhimurium, a bacterium that causes food poisoning. [12][13] Viruses that infect bacteria are called phages, and they do not infect people or animals. [13] Mice given the engineered bacterium before infection kept the salmonella from taking hold and survived more often. [12] The team also inserted a salmonella gene so the target bacterium would not recognise the virus as foreign and block it. [13]

Why it matters — Phage treatments usually arrive after an infection is established, by which time the bacteria are hidden in the gut lining and out of reach. [13] Putting the phage in first is a different idea, and it has only been shown in mice.
11
$123m for a pill to replace an eye infusion

Sling Therapeutics raised $123m to run a final-stage trial of linsitinib, a pill for thyroid eye disease, in which the tissue behind the eye swells and pushes the eyeball forward. [10] The first patients have been dosed in a 120-person study measuring the bulge over 24 weeks. [10] The drug blocks a receptor for a growth signal that sits on cells behind the eye and on immune cells. [10][24] Astellas first developed it as a cancer drug before Sling licensed it in 2022. [10]

Why it matters — The approved treatments for the disease are antibodies given through a drip, and Sling's chief executive says a pill could reach patients who refuse infusions. [10] A growth-signal receptor is involved in many diseases at once, which is why a shelved cancer drug can come back aimed at an eye. [24]
12
Mayo Clinic and Thermo Fisher form a data company

The Mayo Clinic, a large US hospital group, and Thermo Fisher Scientific, which makes laboratory equipment, have formed a company called Precure to collect molecular and clinical data from people before a disease is diagnosed. [15] The aim is to find the earliest biological signals of cancer, heart and metabolic disease, brain disorders and immune disease. [15] Mayo says any money it earns will go back into patient care, research and teaching. [15]

Why it matters — Diagnosis today mostly starts when somebody feels ill, and the years before that are the part nobody has measured at scale. [15] A hospital group holds the patients and the records; an equipment maker holds the machines, and neither can do this alone.
13
Samsung Biologics signs a $262m manufacturing deal

Samsung Biologics, which makes medicines under contract for other companies, signed a $262m agreement with an unnamed European drugmaker, running at its Songdo site in South Korea until 2033. [16] The company says its cumulative contract value now passes $21.9bn. [16] It operates 845,000 litres of manufacturing capacity in Korea and the United States, including a Maryland plant bought in March. [16] It has also made an all-cash offer for PolyPeptide Group to move into peptide medicines. [16]

Why it matters — Most new medicines are not made by the company whose name is on the box. [16] When drugmakers cut their own programmes, the factories they rent keep filling with someone else's products.
14
Anthrax kills Zambian wildlife, and 12 people fall ill

Zambia's disaster management unit says 46 hippos, eight elephants, five buffaloes and a crocodile have died of anthrax in the Munyamadzi game area since July. [17] Anthrax is caused by a bacterium whose spores survive in soil for years and mainly kills grazing animals; people catch it from infected animal products. [17] Twelve people are being treated and nobody has died. [17] The national coordinator said local people had eaten the carcasses because that is what they depend on for food. [17]

Why it matters — Zambia's 2023 outbreak reached nine of its ten provinces and killed four people, and in 2011 five died after eating hippo meat. [17] The advice not to eat animals that died suddenly has to be followed by people who have little else to eat.
15
Blocking one receptor stripped a tumour's guard

Researchers at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center in Miami report in JCI Insight that blocking a receptor called IL1RAP breaks up the network of cells that shields pancreatic tumours from treatment. [18] IL1RAP is a shared relay that several inflammatory signals use, so blocking it interferes with many messages at once. [18] In animal and laboratory experiments the tumours had fewer immune-suppressing cells, less scar tissue and more active cancer-killing T cells. [18] A trial is planned in patients whose tumours can still be removed, giving the treatment before surgery. [18]

Why it matters — Pancreatic tumours survive partly because of the cells around them, which are inflamed and yet hold the immune system back. [18] These results are preclinical, and the planned trial would be the first test in people.
16
An ECG program beat doctors at one heart attack

A neural network trained on heart traces from 173,396 hospital patients was tested on 4,370 more with suspected heart attacks, in a study from University Hospital Basel. [19] For the type of heart attack that shows a clear signature on the trace, it scored 0.96 on a standard accuracy measure against 0.89 for doctors reading the same traces. [19] On the harder type, without that signature, it reached 0.81, and it often missed one blocked-artery subtype. [19]

Why it matters — A standard heart trace takes minutes and is available in any emergency department, so the test is not the scarce part. [19] Reading it quickly and correctly is, and that is what the model does well for one kind of attack and less well for another.
17
Every mutation in an RSV protein, mapped

RSV is a virus that is a leading cause of babies being admitted to hospital. Researchers measured how nearly every possible mutation in one of its surface proteins affects the antibodies given to protect infants. [20] Nirsevimab, the most-used of those antibodies, prevents roughly 75 to 80% of RSV hospital admissions. [20] The work explains why resistance shows up more often in one of the virus's two subtypes and builds a list to check new samples against. [20] Resistant strains exist but are rare so far. [20]

Why it matters — One earlier antibody failed its final trial because circulating strains had escaped it. [20] Knowing in advance which mutations matter turns surveillance from guesswork into a lookup.
18
A stress chemical turns immune cells against the brain

A team in Taiwan reports that acrolein, a reactive chemical that builds up under stress inside cells, changes a protein called thioredoxin 1 in neutrophils, the body's most common white blood cells. [21] The altered cells switch to a state that suppresses the immune system rather than attacking the tumour, and they block the T cells that kill cancer. [21] In mice, blocking the pathway restored T cells inside the tumour and slowed the growth of glioblastoma, the most aggressive common brain cancer. [21] Patients with more of these cells lived less long. [21]

Why it matters — Glioblastoma resists treatment partly because it turns the immune cells around it into guards for the tumour. [21] This is a mouse and laboratory result, and no drug against the pathway has been tested in people.
19
A French injection imported to cover a US shortage

The US Food and Drug Administration has allowed Medexus Pharma to import Hexatrione, a steroid injection for joints made in France by Ethypharm, because the US-approved equivalent, Aristospan, is in short supply. [22] The imported product is not approved in the United States and no other company is allowed to bring it in. [22] It comes in a snap-open glass ampoule rather than a vial, and it carries no barcode, so hospitals must enter it into their systems by hand. [22]

Why it matters — A shortage of a decades-old cheap steroid is fixed by importing a foreign version and asking staff to work around the differences. [22] The missing barcode is the kind of detail that causes medication errors, which is why the letter spells out the alternative checks. [22]
20
Senators question Kennedy's would-be deputy

Chris Klomp, nominated as deputy secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, was questioned over two days by two Senate committees about the power he already holds. [23] Klomp currently runs Medicare, the US health insurance programme for older people, and helped negotiate the deals the Trump administration struck with drugmakers over prices. [23] He has also run searches for senior appointments. [23] Senators focused on how he would use that authority as second-in-command to health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. [23]

Why it matters — Klomp already runs the health insurance programme for older Americans and helped make the price deals with drugmakers. [23] The job he is up for would add staffing and the department's day-to-day running to that, under a secretary who has rewritten US vaccine policy. [23]

02 Lesson why it matters

Nobody can test a vaccine at home, so people judge whoever is offering it

Almost nobody can check whether a vaccine is safe, so most people decide by trusting or doubting the person holding the needle.

The twist

A vaccine is not judged the way a medicine is tested. Most people judge it by deciding whether the person offering it can be trusted.

How it works

A vaccine's protection depends on people accepting it
Almost nobody can check the evidence themselves
So they judge the person and the institution offering it
Doubt about the person transfers to the shot, and doses get delayed or refused
The virus finds the children who were missed

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

The US clinic for people who say a vaccine hurt them

the same step of judging the messenger, from both directions: patients say the health system dismissed their symptoms, and scientists say the answer will be believed or dismissed depending on who runs the study
The 400,000 posts read by artificial intelligence

people reported symptoms to each other on an online forum instead of to a doctor or a regulator, which is where trust had gone
Zambia's anthrax warning

officials cannot inspect every carcass, so the protection depends on families believing an instruction that takes away food they rely on

Where you've seen this

Flying

nobody inspects the aircraft, so passengers trust the airline and the regulator behind it

Restaurant food

a diner cannot test the kitchen, and eats on the strength of an inspector's grade

A bank deposit

savers cannot audit the bank, so they rely on whoever guarantees the money

The catch

Trust decides who acts, not who is right. People have trusted the wrong source and been harmed, and people reporting real side effects have been waved away by the institutions asking them to trust.

And the whole of it

Everyone does this, several times a day, about things they have no way to check: the water, the bridge, the pill in the packet. A reader who has never read a trial report is relying on strangers exactly as the parents in a Bangladeshi clinic are, and mostly it works, which is why it is invisible until it fails.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The measles vaccine did not fail in Bangladesh; the delivery of it did. Unicef says vaccine orders were delayed last year while new suppliers were considered, the emergency campaign missed regions and age groups, and 83% of confirmed cases were in people who had never had a dose. [1]

Why it works on us — A round number of deaths is what turns a long outbreak into news, and it arrives months after the ordering and staffing decisions that shaped it.

Who gains

Sironax — It takes $125m from Novartis for its brain-delivery platform and keeps the right to use the same technology in its own three early-stage drugs. [5][6]
Ascendis Pharma — Novo's exit returns full rights to the once-a-month version of semaglutide, which Ascendis will now develop and own outright. [7]
Samsung Biologics — Drugmakers cutting their own factories keep hiring its: the new $262m contract runs to 2033 and lifts its cumulative contract value past $21.9bn. [16]
Apollo — The investment firm is in talks to buy a business with $9.3bn of steady annual sales, which is worth less inside a company judged on new medicines. [9]
Medexus Pharma — It is the only company the US regulator has authorised to import triamcinolone hexacetonide injections while the approved product is short. [22]
People who believe a vaccine harmed them — The planned NIH programme gives their symptoms a government research home, which patient advocates have asked for and not had. [3]

Who pays

Unvaccinated children in Bangladesh — More than 1,000 have died since March, and about 300 of them after the health minister said in June that the government had met the challenge. [1]
Babies under six months in Bangladesh — They are too young for the shot and depend on everyone around them having it; they are 10% of confirmed cases. [1]
People with ALS — Novartis's drug missed every measure in 251 patients and the programme is closed, the third failure for this approach since 2024. [4]
Connect Biopharma's shareholders — The stock fell 35% to $1.12 in the first hour of trading after the asthma result. [11]
Families near Zambia's Munyamadzi game area — They ate the carcasses because that is what they live on, twelve are being treated for anthrax, and they are now told to leave such meat alone. [17]
US hospital pharmacies — The imported steroid has no barcode, so staff must enter it by hand and run separate checks to avoid giving the wrong dose. [22]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

How many of the deaths in Bangladesh were confirmed measles.

The count mixes suspected with confirmed cases, and Tuesday's eight deaths were reported as suspected. [1]
02

Whether vaccine orders were really delayed.

Unicef says the interim government held up orders last year while it considered new suppliers; that government's former top health official denies any shortage, and neither has published the order dates. [1]
03

Whether the new US study can tell a vaccine's effects from the virus's.

The symptoms and blood markers of illness after vaccination overlap heavily with long COVID, and there are few people who were vaccinated and never infected to compare against. [3]
04

How big the US vaccine-harm programme will be.

Its budget, size and scope are not finalised, and the money for the outside research may be taken from funds set aside for long COVID. [3]
05

Why Novo ended its monthly obesity-drug partnership.

The company told Fierce Biotech it would give no details of the circumstances, and Ascendis announced the termination itself. [7]
06

What Lilly's cancelled obesity drug was supposed to do.

Lilly did not answer questions about how it worked, and it has removed its early-stage projects from its website and its results statements. [8]
07

Whether weight-loss drugs cause the period changes and chills people described online.

The Pennsylvania team found an association in 400,000 posts and says plainly it cannot show cause; posters are not a representative sample and nobody counted the people with no symptoms. [14]
08

Whether Connect's drug will miss again in lung disease.

The asthma trial failed because fewer patients than expected got worse, and analysts say the COPD trial due at the end of the month shares sites and patients with it. [11]
09

Whether J&J's implant business will be sold at all.

The $20bn talks with Apollo were reported by Bloomberg; J&J has confirmed only that it wants to separate the unit. [9]

04 Hope carry this

A computer program reading ordinary heart traces picked out the clearest kind of heart attack more accurately than the doctors reading the same traces, scoring 0.96 against 0.89 in 4,370 patients who arrived with suspected heart attacks.

Also true today

Mice given a harmless gut bacterium engineered to release salmonella-killing viruses kept the infection from taking hold, and more of them survived.
Twelve people in Zambia have caught anthrax from wildlife that died in the Munyamadzi game area since July. All twelve are being treated and none has died.