John Connolly, the new chief scientist at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, has a fresh mission on his plate.

Connolly’s been tapped to take the interim CEO spot at 3T Biosciences, a buzzy Bay Area startup that’s joined the whole cell therapy 2.0 movement with the help of 2 tech billionaires who have shown a big interest in cancer drug development: Peter Thiel and Sean Parker, who lent his name and direct involvement to his eponymous nonprofit.

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Big Pharmas typically don’t get a lot of respect for R&D efforts. Their ROI is bad on a massive annual bill, there’s too much late-stage failure, analysts fret about the endurance of big franchises and the impact of generic competition.

Even as Pascal Soriot is staunching the bleeding around a badly handled Phase III readout for their Covid-19 vaccine, though, the AstraZeneca CEO is taking a bow today as Cowen lavishes praise on the pipeline and near-term prospects for the multinational — for the second year in a row.

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Eighteen days ago, virtually all of the outside experts on an FDA adcomm got together to mug the agency’s Billy Dunn and the Biogen team when they presented their upbeat assessment on aducanumab. But here we are, more than 2 weeks later, and the ongoing debate over that Alzheimer’s drug’s fate continues unabated.

Instead of simply ruling out any chance of an approval, the logical conclusion based on what we heard during that session, a series of questionable approvals that preceded the controversy over the agency’s recent EUA decisions has come back to haunt the FDA, where the power of precedent is leaving an opening some experts believe can still be exploited by the big biotech.

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If you ask anyone in drug development about what motivates them — or even if you don’t — you’re going to get a regular double-barreled blast about patients and unmet medical needs if you’re covering this industry. Less discussed and just as important during a heady IPO boom is a shot at the overnight fortunes that are on offer in the middle of a pandemic.

Sean Bohen’s team at Olema just spelled it all out in an S-1 that can serve as a compactly written handbook on the subject — provided you know the background.

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