We just got tipped off about layoffs at Forma Therapeutics yesterday. Staffers tell us that 25 people in discovery biology got the ax, with execs attributing the cuts to issues involving their pact with Celgene. CEO Steve Tregay confirmed that there have been cuts, adding that they are part of a broader reorganization that is claiming 61 jobs at the company.

But Tregay declined to say anything about the Celgene relationship, which is a cornerstone of the Watertown, MA-based company.

According to Steve Tregay:

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Over the past 7 years, Calico has been so much more than your average, run-of-the-mill secretive biotech players. It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, to repurpose an old Winston Churchill line dating from the time he confronted the Iron Curtain surrounding Stalin’s thoughts.

Launched by industry legend Art Levinson of Genentech fame, with the infinitely deep pockets of Google for support, one of the few big headlines the anti-aging biotech has sparked focused on a major alliance with AbbVie — a giant outfit that conversely likes to show off its drug prospects whenever it can. Together, they’ve been focused on diseases that limit life span — quite an arc of ailments.

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As catalysts go, few loom larger than the aducanumab adcomm slated for Nov. 6.

With its big franchise under assault, Biogen is betting the ranch that its mixed late-stage Alzheimer’s data can squeak past the experts and regulators and get onto the market. And the topic — after a decade of Alzheimer’s R&D disasters in what still represents the El Dorado of drug markets — remains in the center ring of discussions around late-stage pipeline prospects.

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With a medley of adverse events hobbling the late-stage development of vaccines and drugs, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s latest — extended — timeline for the mRNA approach they’re working on with BioNTech is giving some top analysts added confidence that the pharma giant can come up with the regulatory goods next month.

Parsing Bourla’s language in his comments last week, SVB Leerink’s Geoffrey Porges notes that Bourla’s decision to say they “may” be able to nail down the positive efficacy of their vaccine in a matter of days — a big change from his earlier certainty — may also indicate a delay on that to early November.

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The bad news keeps stacking up at Galapagos — which quite likely just lost control of a billion-dollar deal — and by extension their close partners at Gilead.

The biotech $GLPG reported after the bell Thursday that GLPG1972, one of their top development programs, flat failed a mid-stage study for osteoarthritis, flunking the primary and all secondary endpoints.

Testing 3 different doses of their drug, which relies on ADAMTS-5 inhibition, investigators concluded that none of them triggered a statistically significant response — as measured by cartilage thickness.

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