Ep. 376 - M&A momentum: 3Q public markets preview

M&A enthusiasm is carrying biotech amid tepid reception for launches. On the latest BioCentury This Week podcast, BioCentury’s analysts discuss BioCentury’s 3Q26 Public Markets Preview, asking whether M&A momentum can carry biotech through year-end and what happens if the AI trade goes bust?
Editor in Chief Simone Fishburn gives her perspective on what incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s agenda means for U.K. life sciences. The analysts also discuss Ionis’ ATTR-CM miss and Takeda’s orexin program. This episode of the BioCentury This Week podcast has been brought to you by CBRE.

View full story: https://www.biocentury.com/article/660118

#BiotechMA #BiotechInvesting #PublicMarkets #LifeSciences #DrugDevelopment

00:01 - Sponsor Message: CBRE
01:46 - 3Q Market Preview
10:54 - Burnham’s Britain
19:40 - Ionis' ATTR-CM Miss
29:12 - Takeda Orexin Program

To submit a question to BioCentury’s editors, email the BioCentury This Week team at podcasts@biocentury.com.

Transcript

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Voice Talent: 0:02

BioCentury This Week is brought to you by CBRE — the global leader in commercial real estate services, with a specialized practice dedicated exclusively to life sciences. From early-stage biotechs to established companies scaling biomanufacturing operations, CBRE's life sciences experts help companies find, build, and optimize spaces where discovery happens. With deep market intelligence across the nation's innovation clusters, top-notch facilities, and a network of investors and tenants, CBRE has what it takes to help you succeed. This blend of knowledge and relationships ensures you receive the best advice at every stage—so you can focus on bringing therapies to patients

Jeff Cranmer: 0:45

Can M&A momentum carry biotech through year-end? Welcome to the BioCentury This Week podcast. I'm Jeff Cranmer, executive editor at BioCentury, and today we'll kick off the pod with BioCentury's 3Q public markets preview, plus biotech in Burnham's Britain. What does the incoming prime minister's agenda mean for UK life sciences? And we'll also discuss Ionis' ATTR-CM miss and Takeda's Orexin program, the hits, the misses, and the payoff. Joining me today Loyal Three Lions fan, Simone Fishburn. Adopted Three Lions fan, Stephen Hansen. And Lauren Martz, who is just riding it out after her daughter's Brazil squad goes out early. But we will be talking biotech. And Stephen, you spent a good chunk of the past few weeks speaking to buysiders, bankers about well, the state of the public markets. What did you learn?

Stephen Hansen: 1:59

Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. I think the part that dominated uh the discussions most, and is kind of the reason why I kind of led with that in our story was about M&A. Just to give you a few numbers to give you a sense of kind of where things stand. so last year was, by the numbers, you know, one of the best years for M&A, and this year is shaping up to really go well beyond what, what even we saw last year. even just sort of honing in on deals that had a $1 billion or more total deal value last year we saw thirty-nine of those deals. In the first half of this year, we've had thirty-three. So we are seemingly well on the way to surpassing that. Basically, investors were saying that that is largely what is kind of carrying the sector's momentum sort of in the first half of the year. Um, you know, biotech outperformed a lot of the broader markets uh pretty much everything except tech. And, you know, M&A was sort of the attributing factor for, for a lot of that. And, you know, I think part of the reason for that is because there were so many specialist investors that owned a lot of these names. So I think one of the cool analyses we did in this story is we um we dug into the fifteen publicly traded biotechs that were acquired for more than a billion dollars in the first half, and we looked at the thirteen F filings for the ownership stakes of those. And what we found was that across these fifteen deals, there was about twenty-two point eight billion that was being returned to specialist investors. So that's money that is going to be, for-- large part of that is going to be reinvested back into the sector and going to be driving, you know, new ownership stakes in, in a lot of biotech companies. So I like to think of it, if you look at uh if you're looking at a ticker and you see like a three percent or a five percent jump on any given day where there isn't news, that very well could be, you know, specialists coming in and buying into a new name because they have all this new cash that, that they need to deploy. So that's definitely a big tailwind for the sector here going forward

Simone Fishburn: 3:54

So Stephen, you know, one of the uh questions you asked is uh what happens if the AI trade goes bust? Why don't you talk about that?

Stephen Hansen: 4:05

Sure. Sure. So that was kind of the other, I would say, maybe elephant in the room in a lot of these conversations were cause obviously it was sort of, I was having these conversations right around the time that SpaceX was going public and, and doing its IPO, and so that came up in a lot of conversations just because it was so massive. And everyone probably knows how big these companies are, but it, it was this one conversation with Omega Funds' Otello Stampacchia that really kind of crystallized it, I guess, for me in the sense that, you know, he was saying, sort of gave the analogy that, you know, in 1911, Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil in the US, and it was broken up by the uh US government because of that monopoly and because it was so big, and it was so big in that it had a billion-dollar valuation, which was about 2% of the US GDP at the time SpaceX, just post IPO, their market cap was equal to six percent of US GDP. And if you take the seven companies, including SpaceX, seven companies that are making sort of the biggest investments in AI, so Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft. If you combine their market caps, that's over seventeen trillion dollars at the end of the second quarter, which is like fifty-three percent of the US GDP. So there's just this massive concentration of money into a very, very small number of companies in the marketplace. I'm sure people are aware of all these, you know, debates and discussions about whether AI can ever really generate enough revenue to, be profitable, given the amount of money that has to go into data centers and running these things. A-and it just raises the question that if this AI bubble does burst, what happens? You know, does that drag everything else down just given the massive size of these, of these companies? And what happens to that money after it kind of comes out of those stocks? the two sides of it is could drag everything down, or it could go looking for alpha in other parts of the market. And, you know, there are some investors saying, "Well, maybe it starts looking at places like biotech and starts coming in there." And so which obviously money coming in can be a good thing, but if you're a fund manager and all of a sudden your benchmarks start flying straight up because there's all this money funding into them, they, you know, they have to manage those. So just sort of an interesting thing to sort of keep uh keep tabs on. And just to follow it up with one of the early sort of indicators there of, of how this is going is just keeping an eye on the SpaceX as they um you know, over the next couple months, because it was a very small float. Only four percent of the outstanding shares went out in their IPO, and forty-one percent of the insider shares are meant to be unlocked basically through the end of the third quarter. So that's, you know, seven hundred, eight hundred billion dollars worth of shares that are potentially gonna come into the market. So that could be an early indicator of how the AI trade is doing, depending on how well the stock does Amid the flood of new shares sort of coming into the uh coming into the market

Jeff Cranmer: 7:08

Yeah, the uh folks you talk to seem to be on one side or the other there. One buy-sider likened it to feeling the rumblings of an earthquake. whereas uh I think James Lee was… he sort of seemed to be saying that it's very insulated from the impact that the mega IPOs are having on other spaces. So I guess where do you stand, Stephen?

Stephen Hansen: 7:32

So I think the context there was around sort of whether or not there could be a liquidity crunch for, for biotech companies in the sense that if you have so much money being poured into SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, is that money that people are reserving to put into those deals rather than investing in biotech? And I think the argument there is that so much of the biotech sector right now is funded by specialist money, that that's money that wouldn't otherwise be, you know-- It's not like you have a biotech hedge fund that's gonna go put money into SpaceX. And so in that sense, there isn't the same impact on biotech there as it would. But if we're talking about a, a bursting of a bubble, I think there definitely could be, could be issues there because you could have you can have a specialist fund, but a lot of them have generalist LPs. And so if they're losing money on tech or AI, they may have to do a capital call on some of their GP commitments, and therefore, there could be withdrawals from, you know, specialist funds. So it's not insulated in that sense. And so I think that's where some of the concern lies.

Jeff Cranmer: 8:39

Hmm. another thing you touched on, Stephen, were uh the launches you've been watching. at the kickoff Financial Markets Preview that you wrote back in January, you had identified a group of 13 companies with launches that well could push those companies into higher market cap tiers. what's happening with those launches?

Stephen Hansen: 9:05

Sure. Yeah, I mean, so I, I, I thought it would be good to look back at these ones just because, you know, my conversations, I was also asking the question, well, what if everyone is saying that M&A is gonna continue, but what if it doesn't? You know, what happens to biotech if that M&A run, sort of lags off or doesn't, doesn't continue the same momentum carrying it forward. And, you know, a couple of people brought up, well, you know, we, we have these commercial launches that are coming and, you know, these could be very exciting companies for people to come into. But looking, you know, at least through the, the performance in the first half of the year, while the launches themselves, the numbers look pretty good and are, are continuing to do well, the share performance for these companies sort of doesn't seem to kind of match what you might expect from, you know, a good launch. There are several companies that are down. Now, of course, in some cases, it's more than just the launch. Like for instance, Insmed was down thirty-eight percent sort of through the first half of the year, but a lot of that was on sort of pulling back because of a clinical setback they had that maybe, made people feel like their um brinsupri wouldn't have as wide of an opportunity as a product in a pipeline as people maybe originally thought. Um, but there are several others that have had really good launches, at least by the numbers, that are, you know, flat through the year. So it just seems like investors maybe are either have overinflated expectations for these launches and they're just not matching those overinflated expectations, or you know, they're just not buying into them just yet. w-we'll keep following these. I think, you know, they're all good companies that have good opportunities, but just seems like as of yet, they're not sort of catching fire in the way that maybe people at the start of the year thought they might be

Jeff Cranmer: 10:44

All right. Well, you can check out Stephen's 3Q Public Markets preview on biocentury.com. There'll be a link in the show notes. Burnham's Britain, Simone. new man moving into 10 Downing Street, does he get to keep the cat? Isn't there, like, a cat at 10 Downing Street? Like

Simone Fishburn: 11:05

Cat 11. Isn't it at number 11, Stephen? The Chancellor's, uh

Stephen Hansen: 11:10

Have there been-- Are we on… It's still Larry, right? Isn't it still

Simone Fishburn: 11:13

Yeah. Oh, no, maybe it is number 10. Maybe you're right

Jeff Cranmer: 11:16

cat's been doing better than all these prime ministers that have been kind of rolling, rolling

Simone Fishburn: 11:22

Yeah

Jeff Cranmer: 11:22

whatever's happening with Larry. But, but Burnham uh what do you expect out of what his uh impact on life sciences might be, Simone?

Simone Fishburn: 11:31

Thanks, Jeff. So I talked to a few people, a bunch of people in the UK the last week or so. And, first of all, I think we have to stipulate Burnham has said very, very little, right, in terms of his specific policies. So there's not a lot to go on based on what he said he would do as Prime Minister. What there is to go on is the precedent and what he's done in Manchester. When I talk to people, it segregates into a few very discrete questions. So the biggest thing for our sector, for any sector, for the whole country, is who he selects to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, right? That's the economic policy, the financial policy, and, there is this feeling that if it's Ed Miliband who skews quite left for people in our sector, not really that that's the issue. It's that he's very much focused on the green economy and net zero, and there is the idea that attention would go away from life sciences towards that. Most of the other candidates for chancellor, people were not particularly up in arms with one way or another. As with any new administration, what are the tax policies going to be? This is where it kinda gets interesting because there is somebody called Jim O'Neill who is supposedly advising Andy Burnham on economic policy. He is a former Goldman guy, actually was uh secretary of the treasury, I think. he calls himself, I think, cross-party lines. I think he was uh uh, under a Tory administration when he was in government. but he is seen very, very favorably by people as a, as a really g- balanced voice who understands the business needs, the business community. So now going to the biotech specific things, well, here's what was interesting. So the U.K., they always, as with all of Europe, their biggest concern is growth capital and the lack of growth capital. U.K. is doing very well in terms of startups and innovation and so on, but really growing big companies of the order of the Argenx or the Genmabs just hasn't happened in the U.K. It kind of segregates in two things. On the one hand, the government advanced the British Business Bank, and people speak very, very highly of the British Business Bank. They invest in both funds and they invest in companies directly, and they've certainly enabled a lot of really good companies to get off the ground, people are sort of finding very good interactions with the British Business Bank. So big plus in their column. Big minus, however, in the Mansion House Compact, which was this agreement with pension funds that was supposed to unlock a whole lot of pension capital, and I'm just getting a lot of thumbs down when I talk to people on Zoom about that. Like, literally they're sitting there with their thumbs down, right? And so that has just not panned out. There is uh an individual, Andy Haldane, who is also supposedly in, in Burnham's inner circle, and he's very big on unlocking pension funds. So we'll see what happens there, and that's sort of a drumbeat we see also in Europe. And then the biggest thing that people have probably heard about is Manchesterism, right? And so there is this idea of devolution is the word, but it's sort of decentralization so that it's not all only about the capital London. And there people are like, "Well, don't, I don't wanna be made to have to start companies all over the U.K. because there isn't an infrastructure," and that's just not really something investors are excited about. But then they say, "But if what you're talking about is getting more out of the regional universities, then that's interesting to me, and running clinical trials everywhere and boosting areas that can do manufacturing and creating different centers of excellence. It's the ecosystem that could be interesting." So Stephen, I don't know if you've got thoughts on that, but net-net I would say there's a sort of cautious optimism certainly against, you know, where they are right now as a country at least in our sector

Stephen Hansen: 15:37

Yeah, no, I, I agree with a lot of that, and I guess the only thing that I, and I think you know this because I told you when you were writing this piece, I pushed back. I, I, I'm, I'm a little skeptical of people's being so negative on the Mansion House Compact, not in the sense that I agree nothing's really happened yet. I guess my expectation was that this is gonna be something that was gonna take quite a while to get moving and to get up and running because you have to change the mindset of an entire sector and how they operate, and I don't think that happens overnight. I don't think it happens in three years, which is what it's been. So I guess I'm not as down on that maybe as some other people are, but um maybe I'm trying to be a bit rose-colored in my glasses in terms of hoping that that will, that that will improve. we'll see

Simone Fishburn: 16:25

I mean, I think that, I, I hear you, Stephen, and we can, we'll probably go into this in more detail at some point soon. I think that um the general feeling is this, is that life sciences will continue to be a pillar. I think we've seen from other regions that, like look at China, right, industrial strategy makes a difference, and that retaining it, industrial strategy and life sciences, will be important. That there are, I talk about these three individuals, that there are three players who are very important. Patrick Vallance, who's the Minister for Science, Lawrence Tallon, CEO of MHRA, and Steve Bates, in the Office of Life Sciences in the government. And if those individuals stay, then they have a lot of support from the ecosystem in a way that, you know, people in the UK aren't always so complimentary about each other. So, you know, if, if they um i- if they continue, then I think there's really a feeling that UK life sciences, I think what they're really trying to do is to, what would you say, Stephen, be number three in the world? you know, capitulate to the US and China as one and two. Win the World Cup, but let's say, you know, come in bronze, let's say uh on the

Stephen Hansen: 17:38

you, get on the-- I think they'd be per-per-perfectly happy to be on the podium. Yeah,

Simone Fishburn: 17:42

On the podium, podium position there.

Jeff Cranmer: 17:45

Well perhaps this fellow will take after some of the great bands that have come out of Manchester over the years, Simone. Joy Division, The Smiths, The

Simone Fishburn: 17:54

I believe he is… I, I think I'm not wrong in saying that he's spoken about that. So

Jeff Cranmer: 17:59

Yeah, this is some legendary bands. Uh, I know there's some 1975. What surprised me about Manchester's music scene, I kind of think about all this alt rock that's come out of there, but the Bee Gees, those great Bee Gees. Yes. I'm gonna have to fact-check myself, but uh I'm pretty sure the Bee Gees roots. what can we say? Saturday Night Fever, Stephen. All right, we'll take a quick break and we'll be back to jump into the clinic

Voice Talent: 18:28

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Jeff Cranmer: 19:36

We're back on the BioCentury This Week podcast. Last week, data on Wainua surprised investors, shaving billions off the valuations of Ionis and partner AstraZeneca. Wainua was being tested for a much bigger indication than uh what it is approved for. Lauren, you took a closer look. What did you learn?

Lauren Martz: 20:03

Thanks, Jeff. yeah, so these Phase III results came as I think a big shock, and that's what the stock move would suggest to anyone who was watching this indication. So I think the expectation was that in this ATTR with cardiomyopathy indication. We've seen an siRNA from Alnylam work well and get approved. These two programs had very similar, you know, very comparable results in the ATTR with polyneuropathy indication. I think there wasn't a lot of reason to believe that this uh this cardiovascular indication would be that much different. This is-- These are the same therapies. They work in the same way. It's just a different presentation of disease. We saw loss of over three billion dollars in market cap for Ionis. Partner AstraZeneca also fell on these data. It, it was a, a big shock. So we looked into, what caused this failure, this unexpected failure. I don't think we can say for sure. I think Stephen has some thoughts on um, if the modality might be to blame. But there are also some differences i-in the Phase III trial uh in how it was run, in what patients were treated with at the same time. Both the antisense, which is this Ionis program, and the siRNA work by sort of targeting and degrading the mRNA that accumulates in this disease, that creates these proteins that form fibrils. And so they prevent the fibrils from forming in the first place. There's another mechanism to treat these diseases, which is a small molecule stabilizer, so these two are often used together. In this Phase III trial, almost all of the patients, over eighty percent, used a stabilizer at some point during-- like, throughout the course of the trial. That percentage was lower, just a little bit over fifty percent for the Alnylam Amvuttra trial. That alone can sort of change the bar for how effective you have to be over this baseline therapy that you're having in the first place. There's also the fact that when Alnylam's trial was run, that was a couple years earlier when it was started, and there was only one real stabilizer that was used. That was the tafamidis, and now we have another stabilizer BridgeBio which could have also been used in uh in the Ionis trial. So, you know, there's-- maybe it's the modality. Maybe it's the fact that patients were also getting another therapy during this Phase III study. But overall, yeah, this was, this was a surprise, and not great news for Ionis

Stephen Hansen: 22:47

Yeah, and I, I think everything you said there is, absolutely worth, you know, looking into and why sort of, um-- So I wrote a piece that uh I think, you know, like you rightly point out, that this is potentially not an sort of apples to apples type comparison because of all those differences between the, the study uh trials. But it did just sort of spark for me, I guess, maybe a bit of a hot take uh in that I think this is the third instance that, you know, I could find in which we had an ASO essentially and a, and an siRNA being developed into Phase III or being approved in the same indication. And at least in my mind, in each of those instances, if you look at sort of the, the overall product profile, so looking at efficacy, safety convenience, you know, dosing, delivery, frequency of dosing, I just came to the conclusion that it seems like every time the siRNA comes out on top. And so I just wondered, you know, can we not just… You know, it's been what, twenty years where these have kind of been developed in, in, in parallel or so? It just seems like, can we not just say now that when you have to pick between ASO and an siRNA in a certain setting, maybe the siRNA is just better.

Simone Fishburn: 23:54

So, let's dig into that a little bit. So first of all, you know, in your piece, which you put very nicely, you did stipulate to, I think a- another piece of information that will come out later this year comparing an RNAi with, uh … and just to make clear, ASO is an antisense oligo. so, you know, Stephen and Lauren maybe weigh into this, that, you know, if you're comparing RNAi and antisense, the issues that you've talked about, Stephen, often relate, seem to relate to, let's say, frequency of dosing. You … What you're saying is that they actually have a similar degree of knockdown, right? But it is the … And Lauren is, like, like making a "I don't know about that" with her head, so we'll come back, we'll come to, to Lauren in a minute. But, you know, there's the question of knockdown, and then there is the question of them as a therapeutic, which involves a whole lot more. It involves the PK, the PK/PD and so on. And so I'm sort of … What I'm, I think I'm trying to get at, a- and Lauren, you might want to weigh in on this given your expression, is, like, are they similarly, biologically, sort of at a molecular level, efficient at doing their job? Is there something intrinsic about RNAi that would make it uh better at knockdown, or is it really about the formulation, the delivery, the other properties of the molecule that turn it into a better therapeutic? Any thoughts on that?

Stephen Hansen: 25:19

I will admit, I have not off the top of my head gone through every data set for each of these modalities, and I don't have it firmly to grasp top of mind. But the sense I have, the sense I have is that they both can, in certain settings, they both can have very, you know, very high knockdown on things. but the feeling I have is that with an siRNA, what you typically get is you typically get once quarterly or longer dosing with those molecules. In some instances, there are cleaner AE profiles. Uh, you know, liver tox, I think has been a bit more of an issue for antisense over the years than-- Obviously, there have been instances in which siRNAs have run into the liver tox as well, but i-it's come up more on, on, on labels that I've looked at for antisense than siRNAs. and then the other thing I just, you know, looked at was just patients maybe voting with their dollars in the sense that, when you compare some of the sales figures for some of these settings, the siRNAs have done better. And obviously, there's more that goes into sales potentially than just the quality of the molecule. But you know, I think that's another sort of tick uh i-in favor of that. But I don't know, Lauren, if you have anything more specific on the, the mechanisms that you wanted to talk about

Lauren Martz: 26:34

Yeah. So we have seen in a couple of specific settings that, you know, a higher level of knockdown w-with the siRNA approaches. This isn't true in every i-indication, as you mentioned. These are fundamentally different in how they're structured and how they're delivered. and overall, the siRNA approach is kind of more stable, and it can act longer, and it doesn't get used up, and it's… So there are differences with how it works. I mean, there are definitely trade-offs, so it's more complex to deliver an siRNA, for example. You know, you need a delivery vehicle that you don't necessarily need with antisense. So overall, I think the knockdown efficiency is pretty comparable. I think there are still, at this time, cases where, you know, there is a use case for an antisense oligo. You know, there are those N of one approaches, where it's simpler to, like, create this um the chemistry that's needed to create one of these. But again, the delivery of siRNA, it's really advancing. Um, I think that a lot of the work that went in this… I agree with everything you said, Stephen. This doesn't go against your points, but I think that antisense is really important because I think a lot of the work that went into optimizing the RNA chemistry to create the antisense therapies has helped advance siRNA to the point it is today. So I think it's kind of, you know, it's a trade-off between a little bit more complexity, and I think the longer activity is, is definitely more of what patients want versus the maybe slightly more knockdown.

Stephen Hansen: 28:06

Well, and there's, and there's also, I think the other thing is there are, there are instances in which antisense is effective where I don't… And someone can write in and tell me if I've got this wrong, but where you can't use an siRNA, I think that's like if you're targeting splice variants, those sorts of things, I think that's where you-- the antisense approach can work where you wouldn't use an siRNA. So obviously the bas- biggest example being SMA and that's obviously been uh you know Spinraza uh there has been incredibly important for, for SMA patients. And so, you know, this isn't uh you know, what I wrote was not meant to be a an all-around bashing of, of ASOs. You know, I think there are definitely plenty of instances in which they're very useful medicines, but more of just a maybe a buildup of, of observations over time that I just thought maybe we needed to you know, can we, can we finally draw a conclusion here in, in, in this comparison? So

Lauren Martz: 28:58

I think that's fair, and it's right, Stephen. The splicing is kind of a different chemistry for antisense, and that's not a place where siRNA is gonna go anytime soon

Jeff Cranmer: 29:09

All right. well, we have a little bit of time left, and I did wanna dig into Takeda. Lauren uh you've been following this program for some time, and you had the chance to sit down with Takeda's Orexen team, and it's been a journey. There's been some uh setbacks but they seem to have learned each step of the way. what did you learn?

Lauren Martz: 29:35

Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. So we've talked about the orexin program on this podcast quite a few times because it's a really hot target at this time. I think the fact that we went from not a lot of innovation in narcolepsy to at least three late-stage clinical companies targeting the biology that gets very close to the causal mechanism of Type 1 narcolepsy i- is just really exciting. And so Takeda's program we should hear about the FDA decision in the coming months, I think, and it was a good time to look back at sort of what it's taken to get here because of how much excitement there is around the program. And so Takeda was kind of the pioneer in this from the beginning. They worked with some of the academic groups who discovered the fact that loss of orexin producing neurons contributes to narcolepsy Type 1. I talked with the company, with several different people who've invol- been involved in their development programs over the last 15 years about what it took to get here. So Takeda started with an IV orexin to receptor agonist, which worked really well. but with targeting the orexin biology, you really need to optimize the PK to try to mimic what happens with orexin signaling throughout the day. You know, it rises, and you wake up, and it falls when you fall asleep. So this wasn't a case where you could have an IV therapy that patients are gonna have to dose once or twice a day, you know? So the next step was working to develop a small molecule, and they talked a, a bit about all of the challenges that went into designing a small molecule that acts as an agonist, that crosses the blood-brain barrier, and that is stable once it gets there. You know, the first attempts were not successful. the molecule wasn't as stable as hoped. There was a toxicity signal, and that's what ultimately led to the discovery of  oveporexton. Something that I found interesting about this program is I think one of the reasons that it was so successful and that Takeda's out ahead of some of its competitors at this time, is that the pharma fully invested in this. So, you know, when it had a Phase II miss for that toxicity signal, they already had another candidate that was sort of improving upon that one to begin with. So that was already underway, and I think that is an important lesson for some of the people who are really committing to a new biology.

Jeff Cranmer: 32:05

All right. Well, thanks for that, Lauren. Lauren's piece available on biocentury.com. We'll drop a link in the show notes. one thing I wanted to add, Lauren you had a quote from Sarah Sheikh of Takeda, and I thought this was great. She said, "I really think of this as the GLP-1 moment for neuroscience because of the breadth of this mechanism." We'll see. That's a big statement. All right. If you liked what you're hearing, subscribe to us, like us, leave us a comment. We will be back next week on the BioCentury This Week podcast

Voice Talent: 32:44

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