David Wainer

Madrigal and other companies focused on treating fatty liver disease won’t get sidelined by obesity drugs.

AstraZeneca became the latest big pharma to buy a company focused on an emerging approach to fighting cancer known as radiopharmaceuticals. On Tuesday, the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical said it is buying Fusion Pharmaceuticals for up to $2.4 billion as part of a plan to accelerate the development of next-generation cancer treatments. With the deal, AstraZeneca joins Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Novartis in working to develop therapies that can deliver radioactive isotopes directly to cancer cells.

A proposed bill in Congress targets Chinese biotech businesses that play an important role in developing drugs.

Disappointing results for colon-cancer blood tests strengthen the investment thesis for Exact Sciences, which makes a stool-based test.

Investors might get a better sense of the fallout for UnitedHealth Group when it reports first-quarter earnings results Tuesday.

Private investments in public equities, or PIPEs, are all the rage in biotech, but some investors resent the sharing of nonpublic information.

Health insurance stocks have been so battered this year that it doesn’t take much good news to move them higher. On Tuesday, UnitedHealth said its first-quarter adjusted earnings topped Wall Street’s estimates, despite a cyberattack on one of its units that weighed on the healthcare and insurance company’s results. Crucially for investors, UnitedHealth’s results implied that if one strips out some one-time costs associated with the cyberattack earlier this year, its core medical-loss ratio—a key measure of medical expenses—was about 83.9%, roughly in line with Wall Street estimates.

AbbVie’s acquisition of neuroscience biotech Cerevel Therapeutics hasn’t closed yet. Notably, when AbbVie announced the $8.7 billion acquisition of Cerevel back in December, the main focus of the deal was the experimental schizophrenia drug Emraclidine, part of a new class of medications that target the muscarinic receptor. Late last year, Bristol Myers Squibb also announced its entry into the field, buying Karuna Therapeutics for $14 billion. The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing Karuna’s drug for the treatment of schizophrenia.

In-line sales for Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi and a beat for rare-disease drug Skyclarys has Wall Street giving Biogen another chance.

Bristol-Myers Squibb’s market capitalization has dropped so much over the past year that it is now arguably no longer part of the big pharma club. After reporting disappointing earnings figures on Thursday, the company’s shares fell sharply, giving it a market capitalization of about $95 billion. The problem for Bristol-Myers is that its older blockbuster products, cancer drug Revlimid and blood thinner Eliquis, are expected to decline in the coming years and investors aren’t convinced that the company has enough growth drivers in the near term.