Welcome back to another edition of Endpoints Weekly. We had another busy week chock-full of news, so let’s jump into the headlines.
We kick off this week with founding editor John Carroll’s latest survey of the Endpoints 100, in which he reaches out to some of the top CEOs to get their takes on the industry’s pulse. They’re juggling a lot of unknowns at the moment, from upheaval at the FDA to a rising China sector, and John parses all that information into a fascinating read.
This week also saw updates to President Donald Trump’s “most favored nation” plan, a comprehensive look at the biotech real estate market and Regeneron deciding to acquire 23andMe. Not to mention our first stories out of ASCO’s annual meeting, where I’ll be on the ground in Chicago with my colleague Lei Lei Wu next weekend.
Be sure to also check out Andrew Dunn’s
analysis
likening the AI hype to CRISPR as part of our “Post-Hoc” series. And on a housekeeping note, we’re getting a new web address on June 1, which you can read more about
here
. —
Max Gelman
📊Endpoints founding editor John Carroll is back with his analysis from the Endpoints 100,
a survey of 71 executives, most of whom are CEOs, with some VCs and CFOs in the mix. Respondents weighed in on a variety of topics, from staff reductions at the FDA, to tariffs, to the state of biotech IPOs and M&A.
What did biotech execs have to say about 2025?
Executives overwhelmingly placed their confidence in biotech performance this year in the 5-or-below range on a 10-point scale, according to the survey. And when it came to topics like IPOs, M&A and access to capital, John said “the mood is gloomy.”
Click here
to see the full results.
💵 HHS revealed more details this week on target prices
under the Trump administration’s “most favored nation” plan. In a press release, HHS said the price target would be the lowest price in an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
country that has a per capita GDP of at least 60% of the US.
The US’ per capita GDP was about $83,000 in 2023, according to the World Bank’s most recently available data.
HHS wants pharma companies
to adjust their prices “for all brand products across all markets that do not currently have generic or biosimilar competition,” the agency said.
“We expect pharmaceutical manufacturers to fulfill their commitment to lower prices for American patients, or we will take action to ensure they do,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the
press release issued this week.
Trump’s recent
executive order
tasks Kennedy with creating a mechanism for US consumers to buy drugs directly from manufacturers “at the most-favored-nation price.”
This isn’t Trump’s first attempt to implement a MFN plan.
Trump signed an
executive order
in 2020 that outlined a most favored nation plan for some Medicare drugs. In November 2020, HHS
issued
an “interim final rule with comment period” for the model, but the rule was
rescinded
by former President Joe Biden in 2021. Read more in Max Gelman’s piece
here.
🏙️Four years into the biotech downturn
, some companies have found themselves saddled with huge real estate liabilities that are dragging down their balance sheets. Senior biopharma correspondent Andrew Dunn dug into how, during the pandemic boom years, some
biotechs signed on to these expensive liabilities
that aren’t easy to escape now that the market has soured.
Among the more notable examples is Ginkgo Bioworks.
In 2021, Ginkgo signed a 15-year lease in Boston’s Seaport District to build a new 260,000-square-foot space after going public through a SPAC with a $15 billion valuation. But Ginkgo’s stock is down over 98% since going public and its total lease liability ($467 million) is bigger than its market cap, Andrew reported.
Other affected companies include Boundless Bio and Prime Medicine,
but there are more. And some obvious solutions, such as subleasing, won’t solve everything because the biotech real estate market currently heavily favors buyers: The vacancy rate for life sciences space in the Greater Boston area was 26.9% at the end of 2024.
🧬Regeneron has agreed to buy the genetics testing company 23andMe for $256 million in a court-supervised sale,
the
companies announced
earlier this week. The deal still needs to be finalized in bankruptcy court, but Regeneron expects to close the deal in the third quarter.
The news follows a turbulent period for 23andMe,
during which time the company experienced a
data breach
, saw its independent board members
depart
,
shut down
its therapeutics division,
rejected takeout bids
from its CEO and
filed for bankruptcy
.
Endpoints’ Andrew Dunn
looked into
Regeneron’s long history with gene-sequencing efforts,
which he said could offer some hints as to why the biotech decided to pursue the deal.
🔬The race for technologies known as targeted gene insertion is heating up.
Scientists led by the Broad Institute’s David Liu and Columbia University’s Samuel Sternberg have shown that they can improve upon a natural system called CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST) to make it work for large gene insertion in human cells. The new study is the culmination of more than three years of tweaking CASTs. While Liu and Sternberg said much work is still needed, they hope the tool can be used for research and potentially as a treatment for genetic diseases.
Read more here.