Drug Discovery & Development

A researcher at work in an AustinPx laboratory. (Image courtesy of AustinPx) Thermo Fisher’s Patheon division has signed an exclusive agreement with AustinPx to install the Texas CDMO’s KinetiSol technology at Patheon’s Bend, Oregon, and Cincinnati sites. AustinPx specializes in bioavailability enhancement for orally delivered small molecules, and the placement plugs into Patheon’s Quadrant 2 platform, which applies AI/ML to formulation prediction.

More than a decade ago, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) launched CancerLinQ, a platform designed to pool electronic health record data from oncology practices, turning routine patient encounters into a learning system. The platform has since become central to ConcertAI, an oncology-focused AI and real-world data company, which acquired it from ASCO in December 2023. Before the acquisition, CancerLinQ’s most widely used function was automated reporting.

An overview showing Moderna’s diverse technological focuses map [Image courtesy: Moderna] At its recent annual Science Day, Moderna signalled a strategic expansion beyond its established vaccine and rare disease franchises, unveiling new programs in in vivo CAR-T and solid tumor oncology. The firm also revealed an AI-driven research platform it says will accelerate the pace of drug discovery across its pipeline.

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) will hold its 2026 PharmSci 360 meeting October 25 to 28 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The event is the association’s flagship annual gathering, drawing thousands of scientists from across academia, industry, and government. AAPS, which counts roughly 7,000 members, positions PharmSci 360 as a meeting that pairs the scale of a large scientific conference with the focus of a smaller specialist forum.

A clinician sees a pattern in their own patients. They run the numbers to check it, and the numbers seem to confirm what they already suspected. But that confirmation might not be real. “Often a clinician at the point of care will come to us with a hunch — ‘I’ve seen a bunch of these patients, I think this might be going on’ — and when you run the unmatched analysis, without statistical balancing, it can appear to confirm that hunch.

Merck didn’t design calderasib to be the most potent KRAS G12C inhibitor on its own. It was designed to be the most combinable inhibitor. The KRAS gene encodes a protein that signals for cell growth. It cycles between active and inactive states, signaling when cells should divide. Although it is one of the most commonly mutated genes across human cancers, it was considered undruggable for decades due to its smooth surface.

More than five decades after the Controlled Substances Act that President Richard Nixon signed in 1970 placed psilocybin in Schedule I, the same tier as heroin and reserved for drugs the federal government deemed to have no accepted medical use, the compound is on the verge of becoming the first classic psychedelic to win FDA approval. Formal approval may not arrive within the 12-month window Secretary Robert F.

In the U.S. market, generics play a significant role in reducing overall drug spending. The FDA, for instance, estimated that the generics it approved in 2022 alone saved $18.9 billion in their first year on the market. Those savings come out of margins that keep thinning, because generic retail prices are in sustained deflation, as Brookings documented in March 2026 testimony to the Senate Aging Committee.

The GLP-1 wave keeps widening Semaglutide hits the GLP-1 receptor alone, tirzepatide adds a second in GIP, and next-generation candidates layer on a third in glucagon or drop incretins altogether for amylin and FGF21 biology. The competitive map is widening, too, as the Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly duopoly meets oral small molecules, monthly dosing, and a wave of contenders from China. 2017 Semaglutide (Ozempic) is approved for type 2 diabetes.

For most of the GLP-1 era the drugs were weekly injectable peptides, and the lab work followed suit. That is starting to flip. With the 2026 approval of orforglipron, the first oral small-molecule GLP-1, the class is tilting toward pills, and a small molecule asks very different drug-disposition questions than a peptide does, then answers them with different assays. And the pill shelf already holds both kinds.