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Today we talk about how biopharma plans to harness AI for clinical trial design, why two experts think Medicare ought to cover the costly GLP-1 drugs, and what news from Roivant means for its business strategy.
The need-to-know this morning:
- Danish drugmaker Genmab said it would acquire ProfoundBio for $1.8 billion in cash, the latest in a string of deals tied to the booming field of antibody-drug conjugate therapies for cancer.
- Oruka Therapeutics is going public via a reverse merger with ARCA Biopharma. Oruka is developing long-lasting antibodies that target IL-23 and IL-17 for the treatment of chronic skin conditions like psoriasis. Concurrent with the merger, Oruka raised $275 million via a PIPE with a syndicate of health care investment funds.
- Diaganol Therapeutics launched with $128 million in new funding to develop a new class of antibody medicines that activate, rather than block, cell-signaling pathways to treat severe diseases.
How AI will be used in biopharma clinical trials
Biopharma companies are increasingly turning to the startups that use artificial intelligence to analyze data from past clinical trials, genomic data banks, and other health records to predict how therapies might work. The calculus here is to help optimize clinical trials — helping select which patients might be more likely to respond to a given therapy, or to even create surrogate trial participants called digital twins.
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