This morning biotech Dragonfly put out word that Bristol Myers Squibb has handed back all rights to its IL-12 clinical-stage drug after spending $650 million to advance it into the clinic.

The news arrives amid a turbulent R&D stage for the pharma giant, which late last week highlighted Rupert Vessey’s decision to depart this summer as head of early-stage R&D following a crucial three-year stretch after he jumped to Bristol Myers in the big Celgene buyout. During that time he struck a series of deals for Bristol Myers, and also shepherded a number of Celgene programs down the pipeline, playing a major role for a lineup of biotechs which depended on him to champion their drugs.

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Bristol Myers Squibb says the IL-12 drug they were developing out of Dragonfly Therapeutics was scrubbed from the pipeline for a simple reason: It didn’t measure up on clinical performance.

But Bill Haney, the CEO of Dragonfly, is taking issue with that.

The early-stage drug, still in Phase I development, has passed muster with Bristol Myers’ general clinical expectations, advancing successfully while still in Phase I, he says.

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Curing cancer, or finding new ways to achieve curative progress, extending lives, has become a hotbed of activity in biopharma. Endpoints Editor-in-Chief John Carroll sat down at JP Morgan with a group of industry experts working on that. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

John Carroll:

This is a subject that I’ve been covering forever, and I seem to understand less and less what’s going on as I go deeper and deeper into what’s happening. So I’ve brought together five great experts in the field to talk about one of the most important trends in research and development today, which is where are we going to find the very big transformational therapies in the near term that are going to make some significant differences to patients.

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A professionally dressed woman stands in front of an office background and introduces herself to talk about the use of artificial intelligence in pharma marketing.

Except she’s not a real person. “She” is an AI-generated avatar in a video created in less than a minute using the generative AI application Synthesia along with a typed script from a real person — in this case, a healthcare agency executive showing an example of how a generative AI avatar can work.

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