In this edition
Monday: AstraZeneca freezes Cambridge; Lilly pauses UK; Novo’s high-dose obesity jab
Tuesday: £2bn UK investment stalled; Monte Rosa-Novartis $5.7bn; FDA drug-ad crackdown
Wednesday: GSK’s $30bn US pledge; UK pressure-campaign claim; AstraZeneca COPD miss
Thursday: Roche buys 89bio; Novo’s Wegovy pill; Lilly’s Mounjaro in children
Friday: Prologis £3.9bn UK; Shape-VectorY capsid deal
Monday 15 September
AstraZeneca paused a planned £200 million expansion of its research site at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
The project, announced in March 2024 under the previous government, was to create around 1,000 jobs at what is the company’s global headquarters site. A spokesperson said AstraZeneca constantly reassesses its investment needs and confirmed the Cambridge expansion was paused, giving no further detail. The move follows the company’s earlier decision to abandon a £450 million vaccine plant on Merseyside, and it lands amid an unresolved dispute over what the NHS pays for medicines.
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Eli Lilly put its UK investment on hold, including Lilly Gateway Labs, its London hub for biotech startups.
The hub opened in October 2024 as part of a planned £279 million UK investment agreed with the government. Lilly said it was not yet in a position to finalise the Gateway Labs site while it awaited more clarity on the UK life sciences environment, and its regional head confirmed a recently paused UK investment. The decision came weeks after Lilly halted Mounjaro shipments to the UK ahead of a list-price rise, and it repeats the pattern set by Merck and AstraZeneca in the same pricing dispute.
Sources:
Eli Lilly joins big pharma fallout over drug prices - The Observer
A higher dose of Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide produced about 19% weight loss in a late-stage obesity trial.
In the 72-week STEP UP trial of 1,407 adults with obesity, once-weekly semaglutide 7.2 mg cut body weight by 18.7% regardless of adherence, against 15.6% for the standard 2.4 mg Wegovy dose and 3.9% for placebo. On full adherence the higher dose reached 20.7%, and a third of patients taking it lost at least a quarter of their body weight. Full data were presented at the EASD annual meeting in Vienna.
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Tuesday 16 September
Big pharma has put nearly £2 billion of planned UK investment on hold this year, with Sanofi the latest to hold off.
The Guardian, compiling its own count, tallied about a dozen major projects or companies pulled back from the UK sector since 2022, among them Merck’s scrapped London research centre, AstraZeneca’s frozen Cambridge expansion and Lilly’s paused Gateway Labs. Sanofi’s UK head of market access told the paper the company had put substantial plans on hold, calling Britain an expensive place to operate and a terrible place to sell medicines. Companies tie the retreat to the UK pricing and clawback regime and to the pull of the US, as President Trump presses to cut American drug prices.
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Monte Rosa Therapeutics widened its molecular-glue partnership with Novartis in a deal worth up to $5.7 billion.
Novartis is paying $120 million upfront for an exclusive licence to an undisclosed target from Monte Rosa’s protein-degradation platform, plus options on two further preclinical immunology programmes. The headline figure covers upfront cash, option and milestone payments and tiered royalties across the programmes. It is the companies’ second agreement, building on an October 2024 licence for Monte Rosa’s VAV1 degraders aimed at immune-mediated diseases.
Sources:
Monte Rosa Therapeutics announces collaboration with Novartis for degraders to treat immune-mediated diseases - Monte Rosa Therapeutics
The US FDA moved against direct-to-consumer drug advertising, calling it a public health crisis and warning Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Hims & Hers.
In a JAMA editorial, commissioner Marty Makary wrote that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising had evolved into a public health crisis after nearly three decades of weak enforcement. The FDA sent warning letters to Lilly and Novo Nordisk over broadcast promotions, including a 2024 Oprah Winfrey special, that it said played down serious risks of their obesity and diabetes drugs, and to Hims & Hers over online claims for compounded semaglutide. The letters were part of a wider batch the agency issued to drugmakers and telehealth firms.
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Wednesday 17 September
GSK pledged to invest at least $30 billion in the United States over the next five years.
The commitment spans research and development, clinical trials and capital spending across GSK’s US supply chain, and includes $1.2 billion for a new biologics plant in Pennsylvania to make respiratory and cancer medicines. GSK timed the announcement to President Trump’s state visit to Britain, and it came as the company’s home market stayed locked in a dispute over NHS medicines spending. One of Britain’s two largest drugmakers is directing its next five years of capital toward the US.
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A senior UK government official questioned whether pharma companies were running a co-ordinated campaign to push up state spending on medicines.
The Financial Times reported the remark at the start of President Trump’s state visit, with government and industry deadlocked over the medicines-pricing settlement and several companies having paused or pulled UK investment. The comment landed as the industry hoped the visit would help force a deal.
Sources:
Senior UK official questions pharma pressure over drug spending - Financial Times
AstraZeneca’s Fasenra failed a late-stage COPD trial, its second Phase 3 miss in the disease.
In the Phase III RESOLUTE trial, Fasenra (benralizumab) did not significantly cut the annual rate of moderate or severe flare-ups in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and raised eosinophil counts, showing only a numerical improvement. Benralizumab is an approved severe-asthma treatment, and COPD was the route to a much larger patient population. The repeat failure, after an earlier Phase 3 miss in the same indication, closes off that expansion.
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Thursday 18 September
Roche agreed to buy 89bio for up to $3.5 billion, adding the experimental MASH drug pegozafermin.
Roche is paying $14.50 per share in cash, about $2.4 billion in upfront equity value and close to an 80% premium to 89bio’s prior close, with a contingent value right worth up to a further $6.00 per share tied to sales and approval milestones. Pegozafermin is an FGF21 analogue in Phase 3 for moderate-to-severe metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, or MASH. The deal extends Roche’s push into cardiometabolic disease alongside its obesity programmes.
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Novo Nordisk’s pill form of Wegovy matched the injection on weight loss in a Phase 3 trial.
In the OASIS 4 trial of 307 adults with obesity and no diabetes, once-daily oral semaglutide 25 mg cut body weight by 16.6% over 64 weeks against 2.7% for placebo, with more than a third of patients losing at least a fifth of their weight. The result sits close to the roughly 17% seen with the injectable in an earlier study. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Sources:
Novo Nordisk’s oral semaglutide 25 mg delivered 16.6% weight loss in a newly published study - Novo Nordisk
Eli Lilly reported that Mounjaro improved blood-sugar control and weight in children with type 2 diabetes.
In the SURPASS-PEDS trial, the first Phase 3 study of tirzepatide in patients aged 10 to 17, the drug cut HbA1c by an average of 2.2% from a baseline of about 8% at 30 weeks and beat placebo on blood sugar and body-mass index. Most children on the higher dose reached the target HbA1c level. The results were presented at the EASD meeting and published in The Lancet.
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Friday 19 September
Prologis pledged £3.9 billion to expand life sciences and logistics space in the UK.
The commitment, announced by the UK government during President Trump’s state visit, is notable because Prologis is a US logistics and real-estate investment firm rather than a drugmaker. The money is split between the two sectors, funding an expansion of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus for life-sciences labs and manufacturing and an upgrade to a rail-freight terminal in the Midlands. It came within a £150 billion US investment package and ran against a run of recent weeks in which UK life-sciences investment news skewed negative.
Sources:
Record-breaking £150bn investment unveiled during US State Visit - Department for Business and Trade
Shape Therapeutics licensed its engineered AAV capsids to VectorY Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion.
The agreement gives VectorY an exclusive option to license Shape’s SHP-DB1 capsid, an AAV5-derived delivery vehicle designed to reach deep into the brain after an intravenous dose, for use against up to three targets. Shape receives an undisclosed upfront payment and is eligible for up to $1.2 billion in fees and milestones plus royalties, weighted toward milestones rather than cash at signing. VectorY plans to use the capsid to carry antibody payloads for neurodegenerative diseases including ALS, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s.
Sources:
VectorY and Shape Therapeutics announce option and license agreement for an AAV5-derived CNS capsid - VectorY Therapeutics