Biotech, in brief

Roivant, a US drug company, said on Wednesday that its pill brepocitinib passed two final-stage trials in non-infectious uveitis. [1][2]

Uveitis is inflammation inside the eye, and the non-infectious kind is not caused by a germ. It can lead to blindness. [1][2]

The two trials, called Clarity-1 and Clarity-2, took in 371 patients between them. [1][2]

Half the patients on the pill went more than 48 weeks before their treatment failed, against 12 weeks for those on a dummy pill. [1]

Treatment failure is a score built from eye inflammation and other signs of the disease. [1]

Patients on the pill also went 40 weeks without needing steroids, strong drugs that calm the immune system, the company said. [1]

Roivant said the pill met every one of its other goals too, including clearing swelling at the centre of the retina, called macular oedema. [1]

The same pill is already sold in the US as Lisraya for dermatomyositis, a rare skin disease, after approval in August. [1][2]

Priovant, the Roivant unit that owns the pill, plans to ask the US regulator to approve it for uveitis in the first half of 2027. [1][2]

Roivant estimates that 70,000 to 190,000 people in the US have the disease, and more than 40,000 already take Humira or a similar drug. [2]

The pill came from Pfizer, which handed it to Priovant in 2022 in return for a 25% stake. [1]

The trials did not test the pill against Humira, AbbVie's best-selling immune drug, so any claim that it works better rests on separate trials. [1]

Why it matters. The next steps to watch are the full trial results and Priovant's request to the US regulator in the first half of 2027. [1][2]

Nigeria's first Ebola patient of this outbreak is a 42-year-old woman, the wife of a diplomat, who spent two and a half weeks on holiday in Kampala, Uganda's capital. [3] She flew home to Abuja on 3 October and fell ill three days later. [3] Two private hospitals first treated her for malaria, which starts with similar signs. [3] Health officials were alerted only on 19 October, and tests confirmed Ebola the next day. [3] The outbreak began in Congo in May and has passed 9,500 cases there. [20]

Why it matters. She is stable and improving, and none of her 44 contacts has shown symptoms, the health minister said. [3] Uganda's government says it has no Ebola, and the WHO declared it free of the virus in August, so where she caught it is still unexplained. [3][4]

Roche, the Swiss drugmaker, presented new results for fenebrutinib, its experimental pill for multiple sclerosis, at a meeting in Toronto. [5] Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system damages the brain and spinal cord. In pooled data from two final trials, the risk of disability getting worse and staying worse for 12 weeks was 16% lower on the pill. [5] It also slowed the yearly loss of brain volume by 23%. [5] The US regulator has accepted Roche's request for approval. [5]

Why it matters. Doctors see slowing disability as the main contest among the next MS drugs, analysts at Guggenheim Securities say. [5] Analysts expect peak sales of about $1.2 billion a year in total, and Roche's drug chief, Teresa Graham, says one form of MS alone could bring that much. [5]

Shares of Arcus Biosciences, a US drug company, rose 8% on Tuesday after new results for casdatifan, its experimental kidney cancer drug. [6] The drug is in final-stage testing and works the same way as Welireg, a kidney cancer drug that Merck already sells. [6] At an event for investors, Arcus showed follow-up results from earlier trials. [6] An analyst at Leerink Partners wrote that together they suggest a step up in strength over Welireg. [6]

Why it matters. The comparison with Welireg comes from Arcus's own trials, not from a test of the two drugs side by side. [6] The drug is aimed at clear cell kidney cancer, the most common kind, where an analyst said it could be used at every stage. [6]

A UK trial called AD-SMART has started testing whether metformin, a diabetes pill, and atomoxetine, an ADHD drug, help people with Alzheimer's disease. [7] It is a platform trial: several drugs are tested at once against one shared group taking a dummy pill. [7] A drug that shows no benefit can be dropped and a new one added. [7] It will take in 1,200 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's at more than 30 sites. [7]

Why it matters. Both drugs may calm inflammation in the brain, which helps drive the damage, said the lead scientist, Paresh Malhotra of Imperial College London. [7] About 600,000 people in the UK have Alzheimer's, and the first results are expected in 2030. [7]

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University gave BCG, a vaccine against tuberculosis that is also used to treat bladder cancer, to mice bred to develop dementia. [8] Eight to nine months later, vaccinated mice were about five times more likely to show fewer tau tangles, the protein clumps linked to Alzheimer's. [8] They also did better on a memory test and lived longer. [8] The study appeared in the journal Science Advances. [8]

Why it matters. Studies in people have linked BCG treatment for bladder cancer to 12% to 78% less dementia, but those studies cannot show the vaccine was the cause. [8] This result is in mice, and the authors call for large trials in people. [8]

Most Australians who report an allergy to penicillin, a common antibiotic, are not truly allergic, and Australia's main body of immunologists has changed its guidelines as a result. [9] About one in ten Australians, some 2.8 million people, carry the label. [9] Many got it after a rash or nausea, or from a parent's memory of a childhood reaction. [9] The new guidelines tell family doctors how to check the label and when to send patients to a specialist. [9]

Why it matters. People with the label get broader antibiotics, which also kill helpful gut bacteria and give superbugs, germs few drugs can kill, room to spread. [9] They also stay longer in hospital, said Nick Cooling, who leads the allergy group of Australia's college of family doctors. [9]

Five in every 100 US flu tests came back positive last week, the highest for this time of year in ten years, according to data from the CDC, the US public health agency. [10] On the West Coast the figure was 10.7%, against 0.5% a year earlier. [10] The main strain is H1N1, which now carries a small change called G155E. [10] Small lab studies found that antibodies from people exposed to flu last year did not recognise it, especially those from teenagers and young adults. [10]

Why it matters. Doctors worry the strain could hit younger people harder, because many of them have not met this version of H1N1. [10] Fewer people are taking flu shots: about 58 million US adults had one last season, down more than 20% from 2019-20. [10]

A global study in Nature Medicine estimates 18.9 million cases of whooping cough and 115,000 deaths in 2023. [11] Whooping cough is a bacterial infection of the airways that is most dangerous for babies. [11] Between 1990 and 2023 the death rate fell 61% and cases fell 42%, once the changing age of populations is taken out. [11] But after an unusually low count during the pandemic, cases rose about 103% between 2020 and 2023. [11]

Why it matters. Africa south of the Sahara now has about 65% of the world's deaths, and babies under six months face the highest risk. [11] The authors call for babies to be vaccinated on time, and pregnant women where it is advised. [11]

CSL, an Australian maker of medicines from blood plasma and of flu vaccines, named Deborah Waterhouse as its next chief executive. [12][13][10] She runs ViiV Healthcare, GSK's HIV medicines business, which had sales of 7.7 billion pounds in 2025. [13] She starts on 1 February 2027 and will be the first woman to lead CSL. [12][13] The last chief left in February, after the share price fell and investors grew frustrated. [12]

Why it matters. CSL lost $2.6 billion in its last financial year, its first loss since it listed in 1994, mostly from writing down Vifor, a Swiss company it bought in 2022. [12] Its shares have more than doubled since June, and it had announced 3,000 job cuts. [12]

GSK has ended the first human trial of GSK3965193, a drug it had been testing as a next hepatitis B treatment. [14] The study began in 2022. [14] GSK called it a strategic decision on the US register of clinical trials, and would not say whether the drug is finished. [14] The news came a day after US approval of Hibsago, GSK's hepatitis B drug that lets some patients stop treatment. [14]

Why it matters. GSK had already dropped another follow-up drug this year, leaving one in a mid-stage trial. [14] Hibsago is approved only for adults without liver scarring, so other patients depend on the drugs that come next. [14]

27 biotech companies joined the stock market through reverse mergers in the first nine months of 2026, the most in a year since 2021, a J.P. Morgan report says. [15] In a reverse merger, a private company takes over a listed one, often a struggling biotech with little left but its listing. [15] In 19 of the 27, chosen investors also bought new shares. [15] There were just 12 such deals in all of 2025. [15]

Why it matters. Big investors are backing many of these newly listed companies from their first day, the report says. [15] Venture funding still fell, from $9.9 billion in the second quarter to $6.7 billion in the third. [15]

TriGemX Bio, a company developing a migraine drug, agreed to go public by merging with a listed shell company set up by TCGX, an investment firm. [6] The deal gives it $246 million: $86 million held by the shell and $160 million from new investors. [6] The company began as Kallyope, which studied signals between the gut and the brain, and it sold off its obesity drugs. [6] Its drug, elismetrep, is in late-stage tests for migraine attacks. [6]

Why it matters. A merger with a shell company lets a young biotech reach the stock market without a normal first share sale. [6] The $160 million comes from a handful of well-known investment firms. [6]

Eli Lilly, one of the world's biggest drugmakers, struck a research deal with METiS TechBio, a drug company based in Hong Kong. [6] METiS will use AI to design lipid nanoparticles, tiny fatty shells that carry RNA and other genetic medicines into cells. [6] Lilly wants shells that deliver to chosen tissues of the body. [6] Lilly could pay up to $1.1 billion, and the companies did not say how much of that is guaranteed. [6]

Why it matters. These shells already carry many RNA medicines, so a better one could matter for that whole family of drugs. [6]

A US study of 461,682 people aged 50 to 71 found no overall link between eating ultra-processed food and bowel cancer. [16] Ultra-processed foods include some wholegrain and dairy products as well as processed meats, and they make up more than half the calories US adults eat. [16] The team, led by Erikka Loftfield of the US National Cancer Institute, followed people for a median of 18.8 years. [16] Wholegrain and dairy foods from this group went with less cancer, and processed meat with more. [16]

Why it matters. People reported their diet only once, in 1995 and 1996, and the study shows links, not causes. [16] It suggests that what a food contains matters more than how processed it is. [16]

Johns Hopkins researchers compared the genes of 151,642 people with clinical obesity and 128,874 without. [17] Clinical obesity is a newer definition that counts harm from body fat, not just weight against height, which is what BMI measures. [17] They found 127 gene regions linked to it, and 63 of them had no link to BMI. [17] A score built from these genes predicted heart attacks, heart failure and strokes better than a BMI-based score. [17]

Why it matters. The work was a poster at a genetics meeting in Montreal this week and is a preprint, not yet checked by other scientists. [17] The team says more work is needed before such scores change care. [17]

A small trial in Kenya and Zambia gave sevuparin, a drug related to the blood thinner heparin, to 23 children with severe malaria. [18] It is meant to be added to normal malaria treatment and acts on the red blood cells the parasite has infected. [18] Doctors raised the dose step by step and settled on 3 mg per kilogram of body weight, given three times in 16 hours. [18] One child died, and the researchers judged it unrelated to the drug. [18]

Why it matters. Malaria is a leading reason African children go to hospital, and about 95% of the world's malaria deaths are in Africa. [18] This first stage checked only safety and dose, so whether the drug saves lives needs a larger trial. [18]

A study of 3,305 people in China with type 2 diabetes and kidney damage looked at PEG-loxenatide, a drug from the same family as Ozempic. [19] Over about three years, people taking it had about half the risk of serious kidney events. [19] The study looked back at records from six hospitals and did not assign treatments by chance. [19] A lower heart risk seen at first disappeared when similar patients were matched. [19]

Why it matters. Studies like this can be misled by who gets prescribed a drug, so the authors call the heart result exploratory and ask for a randomised trial, one that assigns treatments by chance. [19]

French authorities confirmed that a patient in Lyon who died in early October had been infected with Shamonda virus. [21] It is the first time the virus has been found in a person. [21] Shamonda is spread by tiny biting flies called midges, and until now it has mostly infected cattle. [21] This summer it reached Western Europe for the first time, with animal cases in at least 12 countries, including France, Ireland and Spain. [21]

Why it matters. The patient had a badly weakened immune system, and officials say the brain problems seen before death were very likely linked to the virus. [21] France's agriculture ministry says no risk to the wider public has been found, and it is working with the WHO and the ECDC, Europe's disease agency, to learn how the infection happened. [21]

The Trump administration pushed back a US customs rule that threatened medicines Americans buy by post from abroad, days before it was due to start on 22 October. [22] The rule makes shippers mark every package with codes showing what is inside and fill in a data form for each one. [22] It is aimed at collecting tariffs on cheap imports and at catching illegal drugs such as fentanyl. [22] It now starts on 20 January. [22]

Why it matters. Millions of Americans import their own prescriptions, often from Canada, because they cost far less there. [22] Pharmacies warned the rule could cut that off, and patients sent the FDA, the US medicines regulator, at least 109,000 letters asking it to protect personal shipments. [22]

The Cali Fund, set up so that companies profiting from nature's genetic material pay towards conservation, has received just $10,656 in pledges, of which $7,085 has been paid. [23] It aimed to raise $1 billion a year, and no large drug company has given anything. [23] Drug research relies on the genetic codes of plants, animals and microbes, now often stored in public online databases. [23] The fund asks firms for 1% of their profits or 0.1% of their sales. [23]

Why it matters. Drugmakers' international trade body says the fund overlaps with existing law and asks for money whether or not a medicine used such data. [23] The fund is on the agenda at COP17, the UN biodiversity summit, which opened this week in Yerevan, Armenia. [23]

Some US experts in health messaging say officials should admit that most healthy children recover fully from measles, STAT reports. [24] The US has more than 4,400 measles cases this year, double the 2025 total. [24] Measles vaccination rates fell in more than 1,600 US counties between 2017 and 2024. [24] Official messages stress the worst cases, and vaccine sceptics have used that to claim the danger is exaggerated. [24]

Why it matters. Admitting that most children are fine earns the trust to explain why that is not good enough when a safe vaccine exists, said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. [24] A 2025 survey by KFF, a US health research group, found more than half of US parents were not worried about measles. [24]