drug

Raycaster's Biopharma Bench V0.1: 71 professional assignments across 12 private biopharma company environments. We evaluate whether frontier agents can navigate contradictory records, identify controlling…

Sometimes, the access gap is not a scientific or economic problem.

Merck ran more than a dozen screens for a small molecule that could block PCSK9 and found nothing. The drug that finally worked is a ring-shaped peptide, and it took 13 years.

A psychedelic-like drug for a Parkinson's symptom, mice with half-human brains, and more biotech news in the Readout newsletter.

Retatrutide is a triple-hormone obesity drug simulating GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon.

In 2025, two drugs earned more than double the combined revenue of OpenAI and Anthropic and reached under 2% of the people who qualify. This is a deep dive on the biology, the economics, and where...

Nicotine products like pouches and patches are being promoted for cognitive enhancement, stress reduction, improved athletic performance and much more – with little scientific evidence.

Sometimes, the access gap is not a scientific or economic problem.

Researchers published late-stage clinical trial data today for the latest obesity drug, retatrutide—expected to be the most powerful formula yet—and the results appear in line with high expectations. Patients with obesity on the highest retatrutide dose lost an average of 25 percent of their body weight after 80 weeks, and an average of 30 percent after an extension period to 104 weeks. Overall, more than a third of participants taking retatrutide lost 30 percent or more of their weight. The drug also proved effective at reducing knee pain (by up to 62 percent) in a subset of participants with obesity-linked knee osteoarthritis. It reduced the number of sleep apnea events per hour (by up to 57 percent) in a subset of participants with obesity-linked obstructive sleep apnea. The drug improved cardiometabolic measurements across the board, including blood pressure, triglycerides, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (bad cholesterol). At the start, more than a third of trial participants had prediabetes and, by the end, the condition had resolved in more than 90 percent of those participants. The trial began in 2023 and included 2,339 participants from 131 clinical trial sites in 11 countries. Participants were broken into four nearly equal groups, given either: 4 mg of retatrutide, 9 mg, 12 mg, or a placebo. Across all groups, the average starting weight was around 113 kg (250 pounds), and the average body mass index (BMI) was 40. For the subset analyses, 574 participants had knee osteoarthritis, and 243 had obstructive sleep apnea. The results appeared today in the New England Journal of Medicine . Read full article Comments

The cost of healthcare in general is a debilitating, pre-existing condition for Americans. But the high prices of prescription drugs usually stand out as a pain point. While there are many insidious reasons why Americans pay more—often far more—for their medicines than people in peer countries, exploitation of the US patent system is an obvious one. A study published Monday in JAMA highlights just how much patent exploitation has grown since 1990. In that time, researchers found the number of patents on small-molecule drugs have more than tripled, going from an average of 2.1 patents per drug approved in 1990 to 6.9 for those approved in 2019. Most of the growth was in "nonprimary" patents—patents that generally aren't related to a drug's active ingredient, but are instead for things like minor tweaks to a drug's non-active ingredients, updates to the way the drug is used, or the design of specialty delivery devices, such as auto-injectors. Together, those extra patents on an individual drug can create what's called a "patent thicket," which delays the release of affordable generics on the market, keeping drug prices higher for longer without actual clinical advancements. Read full article Comments