BioPharma Drive: Drug Pricing

JULY 21, 2025

Published July 21, 2025 Ben Fidler Senior Editor Ned Pagliarulo Lead Editor post share post print email license Courtesy of Sarepta One month ago, a 51-year-old man treated in a clinical trial with an experimental gene therapy became dangerously sick. billion to $3.1 billion in 2024. Those projections have quickly fallen apart.

Therapies

Codon

SEPTEMBER 29, 2024

But, regardless of which was first, they all operated with the same core data as their mechanism for understanding life: messenger RNA ( mRNA ). The 2025 genetic network paper fit that bill exactly. On the surface, they hadn't deviated much from the early 2020s: a virus infected a cell and released the genetic therapy hidden within.

Engineering

Codon

MAY 15, 2023

Made from a Cas9 nickase (the histidine at amino acid position 840 is swapped for an alanine) fused to a reverse transcriptase enzyme (which makes DNA from RNA; transcription in reverse), prime editing clinical trials are expected to begin by 2025. Nature Communications. grams per liter titer. coli infections and eradicate biofilms.

DNA

Codon

MAY 15, 2023

Made from a Cas9 nickase (the histidine at amino acid position 840 is swapped for an alanine) fused to a reverse transcriptase enzyme (which makes DNA from RNA; transcription in reverse), prime editing clinical trials are expected to begin by 2025. Nature Communications. grams per liter titer. coli infections and eradicate biofilms.

DNA

BioPharma Drive: Drug Pricing

JUNE 30, 2025

Published June 30, 2025 Jonathan Gardner Senior Reporter post share post print email license Moderna announced results from an influenza vaccine clinical trial on June 30, 2025. as early as the 2026-2027 flu season. An mRNA cancer vaccine it developed has generated promising data , but remains in late-stage testing.

Vaccine

Codon

FEBRUARY 19, 2025

ESM is a protein language model that captures certain aspects of protein structure and function, for example, but is blind to DNA or RNA-level features that drive cell behavior. Evo 2 was trained on DNA sequences but can make predictions about myriad aspects of biology, including RNA stability and protein structures. & McCarty N.

DNA

Codon

JANUARY 26, 2025

The influenza virus was not isolated until 1933, when an epidemic in London enabled British researchers Wilson Smith, Christopher Andrewes, and Patrick Laidlaw to collect human influenza virus from patients’ throat washings. The inoculated eggs were incubated, allowing the virus to multiply. Subscribe to Asimov Press!

Vaccine

SugarCone Biotech

APRIL 8, 2025

You have to add a virus-derived cell fusion protein that delivers the genetic payload to the bound cell, but thats easy, as virus particles have evolved cell fusion as an infection strategy. The most typical genetic cargo for LNP-mediated in vivo CAR T cell production is messenger RNA (mRNA).

Therapies

Codon

MAY 29, 2025

This deadly structure allows it to kill its victims by preventing their cells from making messenger RNA (mRNA) through inhibition of the enzyme RNA Polymerase II. The ADC approach allows healthy cells to avoid the deadly effects suffered by the cancer cells as their RNA polymerase II enzymes are shut down.

Drugs

Codon

MAY 5, 2025

This allowed for the isolation, purification, and study of minute amounts of DNA, RNA, proteins, and cells — tasks ill-suited to the larger centrifuges. Pharmaceutical and biotech researchers produce vaccines, extract DNA and RNA, separate nanoparticles, and prepare samples. ” Asimov Press (2025). Cite: McLain, R.

DNA

Codon

APRIL 28, 2025

Each cell contains messenger RNA (mRNA) that carries instructions for making proteins, so Prasher first extracted mRNA from Aequorea and converted it into complementary DNA (cDNA). This cDNA, housed within a bacteriophage virus that easily replicates inside bacteria, holds copies of many jellyfish genes, including those for GFP.

DNA

Codon

DECEMBER 1, 2024

Many students are taught that the Central Dogma is simply “DNA → RNA → protein.” In 1956, Crick was working on a lecture that would bring together what was then known about the “flow of information” between DNA, RNA, and protein in cells.

RNA

Codon

MAY 19, 2025

By the time health officials confirmed Ebola, which has an average R₀ of 1.95 , as the culprit, the virus had already spilled into neighboring countries. Rapid antigen tests detect viral surface proteins — physical fragments of the virus, like the spike or nucleocapsid proteins — using antibodies embedded in a test strip.

Virus

Codon

MAY 12, 2025

” To those skeptics, it seemed ludicrous that a single protein could be infectious in the absence of DNA or RNA. All one needs to edit genes today is to modify a short RNA guide to direct a Cas enzyme toward a new target. ” Asimov Press (2025). Or look at vaccines and the arc of immunization. Cite: McCarty, N.

DNA

Codon

FEBRUARY 23, 2025

In January 2025, the incoming Trump administration issued a 90-day freeze on PEPFAR while it conducts a “programmatic efficiencies” review. Since zidovudine failed to interfere with DNA-to-DNA replication, Ostertag wondered if it could block RNA-to-DNA replication instead. By February, the U.S. In South Africa, 12.6

Clinical Trials