Capsul Desk writes each daily edition. We are senior reporters and editors from Norstella's News and Insights division, with decades covering the industry's full arc, from a molecule's first trial to the pricing fight that decides who can afford it.
Three nine-figure private raises and a royalty deal worth up to $425m in a two-week run last month, with almost nothing in the $50m to $100m band between them and the seed stage. The companies that need that rung are learning to route around it.
The research exemptions written into the AI Act, amended in July, were meant to protect science. A KU Leuven and Stanford paper warns they may also be the easiest place to hide, and that even honest researchers may not be able to tell whether their work counts as research or something more.
Bristol Myers and AstraZeneca are reported to be talking. While that plays out, argenx, J&J and Caldera each put real money behind a thesis last week.
The names with the most money in AAV are leaving. Eric Kelsic's bet is that they left too early, and he's licensing the tools to argue that first-generation capsids and broken economics, not the vector, emptied the field.
Aphaia's obesity data leads the pack, Connect's acute-asthma topline lands in September, Kyverna's CAR-T filing by year end. What each result decides, and who's waiting to write the check.
Carboplatin and cisplatin sit in the comparator arms of the oncology studies meant to replace them. ASCO's chief medical officer says a missing generic can halt a trial and delay the approval behind it.
Today is a quiet kind of vindication story, the sort the industry doesn't hand out often. A founder spent 15 years insisting that the junk stretches of the
France fined Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly for obesity "awareness" campaigns that, it ruled, were illegal ads. The sums are trivial. The precedent is not: a campaign that never names the drug can still count as promoting it, and India is already further down the same road.
Novo's denecimig heads into US and European decisions this quarter as a once-monthly rival to Roche's Hemlibra, while Incyte and Hemab try to give von Willebrand patients the convenient prophylaxis hemophilia A already takes for granted.
A strong start to the year, booming M&A, and the tariff and pricing worries off the boil. The question, starting with J&J on Wednesday, is whether the cautious 2026 forecasts get raised.
