A lab pioneer fears U.S. industry is losing its edge

Johannes Fruehauf, founder of laboratory real estate companies LabCentral and BioLabs, is increasingly looking to Europe — and even Saudi Arabia — as U.S. policies cloud the future of biotech stateside.

Speaking with STAT's Allison DeAngelis, he warned that startup formation is slowing and his companies are seeing vacancies for the first time. Academic layoffs, he said, will soon erode innovation.

Meanwhile, he said "there's sort of a boom type feeling at the moment" in Europe, particularly in Germany, where "the new government is spending like drunken sailors."

obesity

Kailera drug shows notable weight loss in China trial

Kailera said this morning that its lead obesity candidate led to 18% weight loss over 48 weeks in a Phase 3 trial in China.

The biotech's collaborator, Hengrui Pharma, will seek approval of the drug in China, while Kailera will advance the candidate to global trials, the companies said.

The drug candidate, which targets the GLP-1 and GIP hormones, so far doesn't look to be more efficacious than Eli Lilly's Zepbound, but Kailera said it will test higher doses for longer durations. (Zepbound led to 21% weight loss in a 72-week trial.)

Kailera last October raised $400 million in a Series A round, one of the biggest in the industry last year, in a sign of investors' continued enthusiasm for obesity treatments. It licensed three injectable and oral drug candidates from Hengrui.

Zooming out — this trial is just one of the growing number of weight loss studies being run in China. Obesity rates in the country are rising, and government incentives have supercharged the native biotech industry. Read more on that in our story from earlier this year.

research

It'll be a tough process to eliminate animal testing

The FDA has said it plans to phase out animal testing over the next few years, but it will be hard to carry that out quickly and there's no simple way to replace that approach entirely, a biotech executive writes in a new opinion piece.

"The theoretical removal of animal testing from the drug development industry is nothing new, but at times, it has felt more like a pipe dream than reality," said Rostami-Hodjegan, chief scientific officer of Certara, which uses modeling to help biopharma companies speed up drug development.

A combination of different methods — like advanced in vitro assays, AI-driven computer modeling, and organ-on-a-chip technologies — will have to be used he wrote. "Shifting an entire industry doesn't happen overnight."

Read more to see which new methods he thinks look promising.

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