Amid biotech’s ug­ly start to the year, you can bare­ly throw a stone with­out hit­ting a bad head­line. Now, an­oth­er mi­cro­cap firm is gut­ting its work­force to help keep the lights on.

Uni­ty Biotech­nol­o­gy will cut its work­force by 50% as it looks to pave its cash run­way out to 2023 with mid-stage da­ta on its lead eye drug still in the wind, the com­pa­ny said Thurs­day.

The cuts will pri­mar­i­ly hit the biotech’s Dis­cov­ery Re­search unit and will amount in to­tal to 34 jobs sliced away, Uni­ty said.

In a state­ment, CEO Anir­van Ghosh lament­ed the fir­ings while say­ing they were ul­ti­mate­ly in the best in­ter­est of the com­pa­ny’s fu­ture:

It was a dif­fi­cult but pru­dent de­ci­sion to align our re­sources around our oph­thal­mol­o­gy pro­grams and I be­lieve this sharp­ened fo­cus will pro­pel us for­ward to key mile­stones, in­clud­ing Phase 2 da­ta in­flec­tion points this year.

Uni­ty is ex­pect­ing two Phase II read­outs for lead drug UBX1325 in di­a­bet­ic mac­u­lar ede­ma and wet age-re­lat­ed mac­u­lar de­gen­er­a­tion by the end of the year, and the cash sav­ings from these cuts are ex­pect­ed to help it cross the fin­ish line. Uni­ty said the re­sults from those two stud­ies “could rep­re­sent a trans­for­ma­tive ther­a­peu­tic op­tion for pa­tients,” but they can’t de­ter­mine that with­out the fund­ing to fin­ish them.

Shares of $UBX, al­ready well in mi­cro­cap range, were down around 10% by the clos­ing bell.

Uni­ty’s un­for­tu­nate af­ter­noon comes amid a gen­er­al slow­down in small-to-mid cap biotech, with a grow­ing slate of mi­crofirms dump­ing staff as the pub­lic mar­kets turn sour.

Just this week, small cell ther­a­py play­er Gami­da an­nounced plans to ter­mi­nate 10% of its staff as part of an ef­fort to ex­tend its cash run­way for a planned fil­ing for cell ther­a­py omidu­bi­cel with the FDA. Gami­da is plan­ning to file a full sub­mis­sion for omidu­bi­cel, a next-gen­er­a­tion stem cell trans­plant prod­uct be­ing stud­ied in pa­tients with cer­tain blood can­cers, some­time in the first half of this year, the com­pa­ny said.

But hir­ing cuts haven’t been the on­ly trou­bling trend — biotech com­pa­nies in in­creas­ing num­bers have start­ed walk­ing on drug part­ner­ships in ef­forts to re­duce their own costs. For now, most of these cuts are hit­ting the in­dus­try’s small­est play­ers, but does that mean we’ll start see­ing the same at pro­gres­sive­ly larg­er firms if the bad sen­ti­ment con­tin­ues? We’ll have to wait and see.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

Novartis’ sickle cell drug, approved in 2019 and branded as Adakveo, has failed an ongoing Phase III, according to preliminary results.

The Swiss pharma giant unveiled early data from the ongoing STAND Phase III study on Friday, saying that crizanlizumab showed no statistically significant difference between the drug at two different dose levels compared to placebo in annualized rates of vaso-occlusive crises that lead to a healthcare visit over the first year since being randomized into the trial.

Merck’s blockbuster cancer treatment Keytruda has been handed another indication by the FDA.

The US regulator announced on Thursday that it has approved Keytruda to serve as an adjuvant treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which is its fifth indication in NSCLC and 34th indication overall.

According to a Merck release, the approval is based on data from a Phase III trial, dubbed Keynote-091, which measured disease-free survival in patients who received chemotherapy following surgery. The data from Merck displayed that Keytruda cut down on the risk of disease recurrence or death by 27% versus placebo.

J&J and Legend Biotech’s next step in turning their CAR-T therapy Carvykti into a potential megablockbuster has succeeded, the companies said Friday.

Carvykti achieved the primary endpoint — progression-free survival — in an open-label Phase III study testing the treatment in second- to fourth-line multiple myeloma patients. The CARTITUDE-4 trial, for which there aren’t any hard data yet, represents the biggest development for Carvykti’s ability to compete with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Abecma since its approval last February.