In this edition
Monday: EU-US drug tariffs; FDA CAR-T access; Torrent-JB Pharma deal
Tuesday: AbbVie-Capstan deal; USAID cuts deaths; Microsoft AI diagnosis
Wednesday: UK life-sciences plan delay; AstraZeneca US listing; EU Vertex CF drug
Thursday: NHS 10-year plan; NICE drug delistings; Regeneron myeloma approval
Friday: US Medicaid cuts; AstraZeneca-Summit talks; biotech funding slump
Monday 30 June
The European pharmaceutical industry urged the EU not to retaliate if the Trump administration imposes tariffs on imported medicines.
EFPIA, the industry’s European federation, said counter-tariffs would raise costs on both sides of the Atlantic and disrupt supply chains, research investment and patient access, without changing Washington’s calculus. President Trump had said sector-specific pharmaceutical tariffs were coming “very soon”, and Brussels feared they could arrive before the 9 July deadline for a wider EU-US trade deal.
Sources:
The FDA removed the safety programme that has kept approved CAR-T cancer therapies inside specialist centres.
The agency eliminated the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies requirement for all approved BCMA-directed and CD19-directed autologous CAR-T immunotherapies: Abecma, Breyanzi, Carvykti, Kymriah, Tecartus and Yescarta. Hospitals dispensing the treatments no longer need special certification or on-site immediate access to tocilizumab, the barrier that concentrated the therapies in a small number of centres. The FDA said current labelling, including the boxed warning, adequately conveys the risks of cytokine release syndrome and neurologic toxicity, and manufacturers must still run post-marketing safety studies with 15-year follow-up.
Sources:
Torrent Pharmaceuticals agreed to buy KKR’s controlling stake in JB Pharma for about $1.4bn.
Torrent is acquiring KKR’s 46.39% holding in JB Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals for INR 11,917 crore at INR 1,600 a share, followed by a mandatory open offer for up to 26% from public shareholders and a later merger of the two companies. The deal values JB Pharma at INR 25,689 crore and ranks among the largest acquisitions in Indian pharma. KKR had controlled JB Pharma since 2020.
Sources:
Torrent to acquire controlling stake in JB Pharma - Torrent Pharmaceuticals / KKR
Tuesday 1 July
AbbVie agreed to buy Capstan Therapeutics for up to $2.1bn, moving into in-vivo cell therapy for autoimmune disease.
Capstan’s lead candidate, CPTX2309, is a Phase 1 anti-CD19 CAR-T treatment made inside the body: a targeted lipid nanoparticle delivers mRNA that turns a patient’s own T cells into CAR-T cells against CD19-bearing B cells, avoiding the laboratory manufacturing that makes conventional CAR-T slow and costly. The deal, worth up to $2.1bn in cash at closing, also brings Capstan’s CellSeeker platform for engineering cells in vivo.
Sources:
A study in The Lancet projected that cuts to USAID could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.
The modelling across 133 low- and middle-income countries put the toll at more than 14 million deaths, including over 4.5 million children under five, if the funding cuts continue. The authors also estimated that USAID support was associated with preventing 91.8 million deaths between 2001 and 2021, linked to a 65% reduction in HIV/AIDS mortality and a 51% reduction in malaria mortality.
Sources:
Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID investments and the potential consequences of defunding - The Lancet
Microsoft said an AI system it built diagnosed complex medical cases more than four times as accurately as practising doctors.
Its MAI-DxO orchestrator correctly diagnosed 85.5% of test cases, against a 20% average for 21 physicians with 5 to 20 years of experience. The cases came from SDBench, a benchmark built from 304 New England Journal of Medicine records turned into step-by-step simulations that charge a virtual cost for each test ordered, and the best results paired MAI-DxO with OpenAI’s o3 model. Microsoft presented the work as research, the first output from the AI health unit it set up in 2024, rather than a product cleared for clinical use.
Sources:
The path to medical superintelligence - Microsoft
Wednesday 2 July
The UK government delayed its life sciences plan after failing to reach terms with the pharmaceutical industry over drug pricing.
The plan was to streamline regulation, ease NHS procurement and help promising companies scale, in a sector ministers had named one of eight priority growth areas. It stalled over the VPAG rebate scheme, under which the clawback on branded-medicine sales runs at 23.5% to 35.6% this year, up from around 5% in 2021. Government sources said no deal with industry was imminent.
Sources:
Life sciences plan delayed over pricing battle with pharma industry - Financial Times
AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot reportedly wants to move the company’s listing from London to the United States.
Soriot has privately said he would prefer a US listing and has discussed shifting the company’s domicile, frustrated with NICE’s restrictions on new medicines, including its rejection of the AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo breast-cancer drug Enhertu in HER2-low disease, and with the rising NHS rebate under VPAG. AstraZeneca is Britain’s most valuable listed company; of $50.9bn in product sales in 2024, $21.7bn came from the United States against $10.8bn from Europe. The company declined to comment, saying it does not comment on speculation.
Sources:
The European Commission approved Vertex’s next-generation cystic fibrosis therapy.
Alyftrek, a once-daily combination of vanzacaftor, tezacaftor and deutivacaftor, is the successor to Kaftrio, cleared for people with cystic fibrosis aged six and over who carry at least one non-class I CFTR mutation, which Vertex called the broadest label the medicine has received anywhere. In trials it matched Kaftrio on lung function and did better at reducing sweat chloride, a marker of the underlying defect. About 31,000 people with cystic fibrosis in the EU are eligible.
Sources:
Vertex announces European Commission approval of Alyftrek - Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Thursday 3 July
The government published its 10-year plan for the NHS in England, built around moving care out of hospitals.
“Fit for the Future” sets out three shifts: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention. It centres on new neighbourhood health centres that would bring GPs and other services together under one roof, open evenings and weekends, backed by a £29bn real-terms rise in day-to-day NHS spending over three years. The sector broadly welcomed the plan, with the main questions over how the changes will be delivered on the ground.
Sources:
NICE will strip its approval from scores of drugs and other treatments it judges to offer poor value, the first time it has done so at scale.
NHS funding for a treatment follows a NICE endorsement, so removing one ends the health service’s obligation to buy it, a direct commercial blow to the manufacturers affected in the UK market. The 10-year plan gives NICE a formal new role to identify outdated technologies and therapies for removal and to re-evaluate its recommendations on a rolling basis.
Sources:
NICE to remove approval from scores of drugs for first time - HSJ
Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England - gov.uk
Regeneron won accelerated US approval for Lynozyfic, a bispecific antibody for advanced multiple myeloma.
The FDA cleared linvoseltamab for adults whose myeloma has returned or resisted at least four prior lines of treatment, including a proteasome inhibitor, an immunomodulator and an anti-CD38 antibody. Lynozyfic binds BCMA on myeloma cells to CD3 on T cells, recruiting the immune system to the tumour. In the LINKER-MM1 trial, 70% of patients responded and 45% reached a complete response or better.
Sources:
Lynozyfic (linvoseltamab-gcpt) receives FDA accelerated approval for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma - Regeneron
Friday 4 July
The US House of Representatives passed President Trump’s tax bill, sending its health provisions to enactment.
The House voted 218 to 214 on 3 July to approve H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the President signed the next day. The law cuts federal Medicaid spending and tightens Affordable Care Act marketplace rules; the Congressional Budget Office estimated the health provisions would leave about 11.8 million more people without insurance by 2034. It reshapes the finances of the hospitals and doctors that depend on Medicaid and marketplace coverage.
Sources:
Roll Call 190: passage of H.R. 1 - US House of Representatives
AstraZeneca is in talks to license Summit Therapeutics’ lung-cancer drug ivonescimab in a deal that could reach $15bn.
The partnership under discussion could pay Summit as much as $15bn over time, including an upfront payment of several billion dollars plus milestones, though terms are not settled and Summit has spoken to other large drugmakers. Ivonescimab is a bispecific antibody that blocks both PD-1 and VEGF, and it beat Merck’s Keytruda, the world’s best-selling medicine, in a head-to-head lung-cancer trial in China last year. Summit holds the drug’s rights outside China, and neither company confirmed the talks.
Sources:
The biotech funding slump deepened in the first half of 2025, with large private rounds falling sharply.
The number of megarounds of $100m or more fell 38% year on year, to 31 from 50, and the money raised in them dropped from $8.91bn to $5.76bn, on Endpoints News tracking. Investors positioned for the downturn as much as against it: Catalio Capital Management closed a fourth venture fund of more than $400m, which it said was timed to exploit a historic buyer’s market in biotech.
Sources:
Number of megarounds drops 38% in first half as biotechs struggle against worsening slump - Endpoints News
Catalio Capital Management raises over $400M in its fourth venture fund - Catalio Capital Management