Biotech, in brief

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the country's health regulator, approved AbbVie's drug tavapadon for adults with Parkinson's disease. [1]

The approval appeared on the FDA's website on Friday 25 September. The drug is a pill taken once a day and will be sold as Juvmo. [1]

Parkinson's is a long-term brain condition. It slowly damages control of movement, often causing shaking, stiffness and poor balance. [1]

Juvmo works by copying dopamine, a brain chemical that falls in people with Parkinson's. [1]

Endpoints, a biopharma news site, calls it a next-generation dopamine agonist, a newer drug of a kind that acts like dopamine. It is expected to give the same relief as the older ones. [2]

The approval rests on AbbVie's late-stage trials, which showed the drug eased symptoms. Nausea, dizziness and headache were the most common side effects. [1]

AbbVie got the drug when it bought Cerevel Therapeutics for $8.7 billion in 2023. [1]

More than 11 million people live with Parkinson's worldwide, AbbVie says. [1]

AbbVie did not tell Reuters the price or the launch date. Citi analysts had expected a launch in the third quarter of 2026, with slow early use while Medicare coverage is negotiated. [1]

Why it matters. Watch what AbbVie charges for Juvmo and how quickly Medicare agrees to cover it, the step Citi analysts expect to slow early use. [1]

The drugmaker Eli Lilly will pay InnoCare Pharma $100 million up front, and possibly $3.25 billion more, InnoCare announced on Thursday 24 September. [3] InnoCare is based in Beijing and works on cancer and autoimmune disease, in which the body's defences attack its own tissue. [3] Neither company said which diseases the deal covers, only that it spans medicines aimed at up to five targets. [3] It is Lilly's fourth deal with a China-based drugmaker since January 2025, after Insilico Medicine, Innovent Biologics and Haisco. [3]

Why it matters. Only $100 million of the headline $3.35 billion is certain today. [3] Lilly keeps coming back to China-based drugmakers: this is its fourth such deal in under two years. [3]

Trump administration officials said on Friday 18 September that every US state had agreed to join GENEROUS, a federal plan to get lower drug prices for state Medicaid programmes. [4] Mehmet Oz, who runs the US agency for Medicare and Medicaid, said every state realised it needed to take the deal. [4] Officials in several states told STAT, a health news site, they are still undecided, even if they technically applied. [4] The prices states would get under the plan have not been made public. [5]

Why it matters. Whether GENEROUS lowers what Medicaid pays depends on states joining. [4] Several are still working out whether it beats the discounts drugmakers already give them. [4]

Researchers at the University of Missouri found that, with age, the link where a nerve tells a muscle to tighten works less reliably, in people and in animals. [7] They tied it to lower levels of NaV1.4, a protein that helps muscle fibres answer the nerve's signal. [7] Partly blocking another protein, ClC-1, made ageing muscle respond better and made it stronger in animals. [7] The approach comes from NMD Pharma, a biotechnology company in Denmark, and the study appeared in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. [7]

Why it matters. Sarcopenia, the loss of muscle strength with age, affects nearly half of adults over 80. [7] NMD Pharma's drug ignaseclant works this way and improved strength in people with Charcot-Marie-Tooth, an inherited nerve-and-muscle disorder, but has not been tried in older adults. [7]

The FDA has published a warning letter, dated 11 September, to NexCell Scientific, a company in Irvine, California. [12] NexCell makes a product from cells in another person's umbilical cord blood, the blood left in the cord after a birth. [12] The FDA says the product is meant to treat inflammation, injuries, nerve conditions and liver cirrhosis, which makes it a drug that needs an approval it does not have. [12] Inspectors also found the company had not shown that its process keeps the product sterile. [12]

Why it matters. Cord blood's natural job is rebuilding blood and immune cells, and without approval the product has never been shown to the FDA to be safe and effective for anything else. [12] NexCell was given 15 working days to reply. [12]

Siemens Healthineers and Novo Nordisk are teaming up to get more people tested for fatty liver disease, Fierce Biotech reported on 22 September. [11] Nearly a quarter of US adults have it, yet diagnosis is low. [11] It causes few or no symptoms until late in the disease. [11] Left untreated, it can scar the liver and lead to liver failure. [11] Siemens sells the ELF Test, a blood test that helps judge that risk, and Novo's obesity drug Wegovy was approved last year to treat some adults with MASH, the disease's worse form. [11]

Why it matters. The aim is to find the disease earlier, when it is easier to treat, with blood tests that are less invasive than a liver biopsy, where a small piece of the liver is taken. [11]

Deleting one gene made fruit flies live longer without stopping them having young, a study in Nature reported on 23 September. [9] The gene makes Lsp2, a protein known for storing food, which the flies' fat tissue makes when they eat enough of the building blocks of protein. [9] The researchers found Lsp2 also turns up mTORC1, a switch that tells cells to grow, and pushes cells to make more of their protein-making parts. [9] Removing it lengthened life by a different route from rapamycin, a drug that works on the same switch. [9]

Why it matters. It points at a signal from fat tissue that tells the body food is plentiful and to keep building. [9] The study was done in flies. [9]

An analysis of 1.3 million chemical reactions in US patents found chemists use hazardous solvents, the liquids reactions are carried out in, more than they did in 1976, Nature reported on 25 September. [13] Solvents classed as hazardous appeared in about 60% of patented reactions in 1976 and in more than 70% by 2016. [13] Many of the patents cover early drug discovery. [13] Use of trifluoroacetic acid, needed to make popular peptide drugs and by some definitions a 'forever chemical', rose sharply. [13]

Why it matters. When rules restricted one toxic solvent, chemists more often switched to another hazardous one than to a safer one. [13] A Biohaven executive said chemists hunting for new drugs have almost no reason to choose greener methods. [13]

Scientists reported in Science on 24 September that a human gene called BC200 has been copied into the DNA of molluscum contagiosum virus, a poxvirus found only in people. [10] The authors estimate the two copies got there within the last 160,000 years. [10] About 40 million years ago BC200 was put to work helping control how nerve cells make proteins. [10] Yet it never lost its old ability to copy itself around the genome, and some people carry new copies that others lack. [10]

Why it matters. Nearly half of human DNA is made of such jumping genes, and almost none can still move. [10] This is the first known case of one that kept moving after the body gave it a job. [10]

Researchers at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave worms a bacterium that makes magnetic particles. [8] The worms, a kind called C. elegans that is widely used in ageing research, lived 43% longer on average. [8] Their nerves and guts also stayed in better shape as they aged. [8] The team linked the effect to less iron building up, which held back ferroptosis, a kind of cell death driven by iron. [8]

Why it matters. A version of the bacterium that could not make magnetic particles did not lengthen life. [8] The result is in worms only, and the authors already speak of a possible use in medicine for older people. [8]