Thanks to Facebook’s name change to Meta last year, everyone is talking about the metaverse — especially companies and brands scrambling to figure out how they’re going to play on the platform. But should pharma companies be jumping in to the metaverse, whatever it is?

Yes and no, industry experts say. There are some initial plays for pharma, like using augmented or virtual reality to better show how a drug works or what Parkinson’s disease tremors feel like. The future of the metaverse is still very much in the future, along with its major uses across biopharma in R&D, patient communications, drug launches, manufacturing and marketing. But it is on the way.

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Earlier this month, during the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown, Angie You recalled the speed with which female biotech CEOs were helping each other connect with bankers, get their wires through and assuage concerns during a financial implosion.

This past weekend, 50 of about 125 women who are part of that Slack group and a broader coalition self-dubbed the Biotech Sisterhood met in person in Cancun for the second rendition of an annual summit connecting female biotech CEOs. The attendance list doubled that of the inaugural gathering in Arizona 12 months ago.

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The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is now reviewing Novo Nordisk’s marketing violation that resulted in its loss of UK trade group membership last week. Novo Nordisk was suspended on Thursday from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) for two years after an investigation by its regulatory arm found the pharma broke its conduct rules.

MHRA said on Tuesday that its review of the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) investigation is standard practice. An MHRA spokesperson emphasized in an email to Endpoints News that the situation with Novo Nordisk is “incredibly rare” while also noting ABPI took “swift and proportionate action.”

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Just as pharma marketers finally make moves into TikTok, the threat of a US ban on the social media channel is now looming. Already banned on federal employee phones by an initial Congressional act, more bills and maybe bans are on the way. With rare bipartisan agreement, lawmakers have introduced legislation that would give the US president the power to ban TikTok (although not mentioned by name) and other foreign-owned technology platforms that represent a security threat to the US.

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What do you get when you combine ChatGPT generative AI technology with specific pharma and clinical datasets? A time-saving tool that can answer questions about medical conference abstracts and clinical findings in seconds in one new application from ZoomRx called FermaGPT.

ZoomRx is debuting a public version of its generative AI product specifically for medical conferences beginning this week for the upcoming American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting that runs April 14-19.

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The same day that Roche touted positive durability and safety data for its spinal muscular atrophy drug Evrysdi, Novartis also made a splash with its multi-million dollar gene therapy for the disease.

Novartis rolled out interim data from two long-term follow-up studies Monday at the 2023 Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Clinical and Scientific Conference. In the first study, LT-001, all children in the trial that were treated after showing symptoms of SMA “maintained all previously achieved motor milestones” up to 7.5 years after being dosed. The average time since Zolgensma was given was 6.86 years.

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Another leader is departing Kite Pharma, and will to spend the “last part” of his career exploring how cancer evades the immune system.

Kite’s senior VP and global head of cell therapy research Francesco Marincola left the Gilead CAR-T unit last week for Sonata Therapeutics. Flagship last May unveiled the startup, which was pieced together from two fledgling biotechs Inzen and Cygnal Therapeutics. As CSO, Marincola will lead Sonata’s push to reprogram cancer cells to make them more immunogenic.

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