Pre­dict­ing which of the cur­rent block­busters will as­cend to new heights is any­one’s game, and one that high­lights the cur­rent dy­nam­ics of the in­dus­try. On Fri­day it’s Glob­al­Da­ta’s turn to pick out the ther­a­pies that it be­lieves will come out on top in some in­tense­ly com­pet­i­tive spaces.

Hu­mi­ra may still top the chart for best-sell­ing drugs in the world, but Keytru­da is set to over­take the shrink­ing fran­chise in around five years time — with four oth­er drugs set to get ahead of Ab­b­Vie’s biggest cash cow.

The $22.2 bil­lion es­ti­mate for Keytru­da is among the high­est num­ber put for­ward by an­a­lysts. Eval­u­ate pegged world­wide sales in 2024 at $17 bil­lion, while Mizuho’s Mara Gold­stein’s fore­cast was that it would sur­pass $20 bil­lion by then.

Mer­ck’s R&D en­gine — which has pumped out a se­ries of clin­i­cal wins en­abling new fil­ings — is cru­cial to its growth, ac­cord­ing to Glob­al­Da­ta phar­ma an­a­lyst Ke­shali­ni Sabarat­nam. Just days ago the phar­ma gi­ant cel­e­brat­ed an­oth­er mile­stone in the form of an OK in Chi­na for front­line non-small cell lung can­cer.

“It has re­ceived mar­ket ap­provals for over 20 on­col­o­gy in­di­ca­tions in the US, and is con­tin­u­ing to ex­pand in­to new in­di­ca­tions and mar­kets glob­al­ly,” she said in a state­ment.

What Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb lagged in Op­di­vo 2025 sales, though, it is like­ly mak­ing up in num­bers. The #2, #3 and #4 drugs on the list will be its by then, in­clud­ing the blood thin­ner Eliquis ($18.7 bil­lion), Cel­gene’s mul­ti­ple myelo­ma drug Revlim­id ($12.4 bil­lion), and the PD-1 check­point ($12 bil­lion).

J&J’s Im­bru­vi­ca comes next at $11.9 bil­lion, with an­a­lysts en­cour­aged by the BTK in­hibitor’s use in mul­ti­ple can­cers as well as chron­ic graft-ver­sus-host-dis­ease.

Bik­tarvy’s #6 po­si­tion just af­ter Hu­mi­ra con­tin­ues to un­der­score Gilead’s dom­i­nance in the HIV mar­ket, with $10 bil­lion pen­ciled in.

An­a­lysts al­so ap­pear un­fazed by the threats posed by ri­val CDK4/6 drugs from No­var­tis and Eli Lil­ly against Pfiz­er’s Ibrance, just trail­ing Bik­tarvy. While the drug on­ly gar­nered $2.8 bil­lion in 2018, the pre­dict­ed 2024 sales is as high as $9 bil­lion.

Round­ing out the list are J&J’s Ste­lara and Eli Lil­ly’s Trulic­i­ty, the on­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tives in the crowd­ed pso­ri­a­sis and di­a­betes field, which are filled with oth­er block­buster con­tenders.

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

Amgen has signed up to be AbbVie’s neighbor in South San Francisco as it moves into a nine-story R&D facility in the booming biotech hub.

The arrangement gives Amgen 240,000 square feet of space on the Gateway of Pacific Campus, just a few minutes drive from its current digs at Oyster Point. The new hub will open in 2022 and house the big biotech’s Bay Area employees working on cardiometabolic, inflammation and oncology research.

Scripps and AbbVie go way back. Research conducted in the lab of Scripps scientist Richard Lerner led to the discovery of Humira. The antibody, approved by the FDA in 2002 and sold by AbbVie, went on to become the world’s bestselling treatment. In 2018, the drugmaker and the non-profit organization signed a pact focused on developing cancer treatments — and now, the scope of that partnership has broadened to encompass a range of diseases, including immunological and neurological conditions.

Three Samsung executives in Korea are going to jail.

The convictions came in what prosecutors had billed as “biggest crime of evidence destruction in the history of South Korea”: a case of alleged corporate intrigue that was thrown open when investigators found what was hidden beneath the floor of a Samsung BioLogics plant. Eight employees in total were found guilty of evidence tampering and the three executives were each sentenced to up to two years in prison.

Cellarity started with a simple — but far from easy — idea that Avak Kahvejian and his team were floating around at Flagship Pioneering: to digitally encode a cell.

As he and his senior associate Nick Plugis dug deeper into the concept, they found that most of the models others have developed take a bottom-up approach, where they assemble the molecules inside cells and the connections between them from scratch. What if they opt for a top-down approach, aided by single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning, to gauge the behavior of the entire cellular network?