The annual exercise where analysts try and predict which drugs will become blockbusters and make the most money tends to highlight the biggest trends in biopharma R&D. 2022 is no exception.

The team at Evaluate Vantage published its predictions for the top 10 selling drugs for the year — expecting tens of billions of dollars in sales and highlighting an industry-wide focus on certain diseases and indications.

As the Democrats’ big shot at major drug pricing reform hangs in the balance, the Congressional Budget Office has released a new report showing the average net price of brand-name prescription drugs in Medicare Part D more than doubled from 2009 to 2018.

Overall, the average net price of a prescription — the cost after discounts and rebates given to private insurers and federal programs — fell from $57 in 2009 to $50 in 2018 in the Medicare Part D program and from $63 to $48 in the Medicaid program, according to the CBO’s latest prescription drug spending, use and pricing report. That partially reflects the increased use and falling average price of generic drugs.

Mustang Bio is in familiar territory, but that isn’t a place it necessarily wants to be.

The FDA has placed a hold on Mustang Bio’s pivitol trial for its gene therapy to treat patients with bubble boy disease, citing issues surrounding chemistry, manufacturing and controls clearance. It’s the second hold due to CMC issues the company has received in roughly 18 months.

An investigational new drug application was submitted in December 2021. If granted an IND, a Phase II study will then assess safety, tolerability and efficacy of MB-207. If approved by the FDA, the therapy would one day be eligible for a rare pediatric disease voucher.

The summer before Cellino CEO and co-founder Nabiha Saklayen started at Harvard, she lost her grandmother following complications to diabetes. Before then, she hadn’t taken a biology class since ninth or tenth grade — the mark of a classic physicist — but it was then she decided she wanted the rest to sit at the intersection of the two for the rest of her career

Combine that with being across the way from the University’s stem cell institute in Cambridge, and you get the birth of Cellino, an autonomous cell therapy manufacturing company that just announced the closing of its Series A.

Pfizer and BioNTech announced Tuesday that they’ve initiated a clinical study to evaluate the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of an Omicron-targeted vaccine candidate in healthy adults 18 through 55 years of age, although it remains unclear when, if ever, that vaccine might be necessary.

Drawing on some of the participants from the companies’ Phase III booster study, the trial will enroll up to 1,420 participants and evaluate three groups of healthy adults up to the age of 55, including one group who received 2 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and will get one shot of the Omicron-specific booster, one group that received three doses of the Pfizer vaccine and will get one of the Omicron-based vaccines, and then a third group receiving three doses of the Omicron-based vaccine.