The Bio Report

The treatment of inflammatory bowel disease currently relies on immunosuppressive therapies that often lose effectiveness, carry infection risks, and drive high treatment cycling. Abivax is betting that fine-tuning, rather than suppressing, the immune system can reshape the treatment paradigm in IBD. Marc de Garidel, CEO of Abivax, discusses how a once-failed HIV candidate evolved into a late‑stage oral IBD therapy that may deliver durable remission, how it acts upstream of key inflammatory pathways, and its potential in a crowded but still underserved IBD market.

Many people with the genetic condition Lynch syndrome live with the near‑certainty that they will one day develop cancer and have few options beyond constant screening and, in some cases, preventive surgery. Nouscom is trying to change that by training the immune system to spot and destroy cancer cells before tumors ever form. We spoke to Marina Udier, CEO of Nouscom, about the company’s experimental cancer vaccines, how they work, and the broader potential for the company’s off‑the‑shelf cancer therapies.

Alzheimer’s disease drug development has long focused on slowing memory loss, but for many families, the tipping point that makes home care impossible is not cognition—it is psychosis. Hallucinations and delusions in Alzheimer’s are a distinct, prevalent, and under-recognized target for therapy. We spoke to Elizabeth Thompson, executive vice president and head of R&D at Acadia Pharmaceuticals, about the biology behind psychosis in dementia, the company’s experimental therapy to treat the condition in people with Alzheimer’s disease, and the forces reshaping the drug development landscape to enable the development of such treatments.

RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was originally designed to prosecute organized crime. Today, it sits at the center of a landmark class action against two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies over the diabetes drug Actos. Attorney Harrison James of Wisner Baum discusses Painters and Allied Trades District Council 82 Health Care Fund v. Takeda, a national civil RICO case alleging that Takeda and Eli Lilly carried out a coordinated, years-long scheme to downplay known bladder cancer risks. The complaint asserts that regulators, physicians, and third-party payers were misled, leading to billions of dollars in reimbursements for the drug. James discusses how RICO’s legal framework applies in the pharmaceutical context, what it took to secure class certification where similar efforts have failed, and the broader implications this case may hold for the industry.

Pancreatic cancer remains one of oncology’s deadliest diagnoses, with standard treatments often offering only transient tumor shrinkage at the cost of grueling side effects and rapid resistance. Immuneering is using transcriptomic and informatics tools to design a MEK inhibitor dosed in intense daily pulses rather than continuously. This approach aims to restore a more normal signaling rhythm in healthy cells while repeatedly ambushing tumors. Ben Zeskind, CEO of Immuneering, discusses how the company is using its informatics-driven dosing regimen to re-engineer targeted cancer therapy so it extends survival, delays resistance, and is better tolerated.