Boris John­son may have pledged to con­tin­ue build­ing on Britain’s “enor­mous strengths” in life sci­ence as he blazes a path to­ward Brex­it, but one of the coun­try’s top fun­ders of bio­med­ical re­search is de­mand­ing more.

In a let­ter to the UK’s new Prime Min­is­ter, Well­come Trust warned that “the fi­nal months of 2019 could be a tip­ping point for UK sci­ence” and leav­ing the EU with­out a deal is a threat to the thriv­ing sec­tor. La­dy Eliza Man­ning­ham-Buller, who chairs the char­i­ty, urged John­son to make a sig­nif­i­cant state­ment on sci­ence to lay out his vi­sion in the face of glob­al health emer­gen­cies and the loom­ing loss of ac­cess to col­lab­o­ra­tion with Eu­ro­pean peers.

But David Grainger of Medicxi, a Lon­don-based VC firm known for its as­set-cen­tric plays around Eu­rope, dis­missed Well­come Trust’s let­ter as “more scare­mon­ger­ing” and as­sert­ed “UK as a place to do sci­ence will be un­af­fect­ed” by Brex­it.

I am re­spon­si­ble for more than 20 UK biotech com­pa­nies and we en­vis­age no im­pact in our busi­ness­es from a #NoDeal #brex­it – so I have skin in mak­ing such state­ment (ar­guably more than @well­cometrust does)

— David Grainger (@sci­ences­can­ner) Ju­ly 28, 2019

One of John­son’s key promis­es to the par­ty mem­bers who elect­ed him was that he will ex­e­cute the UK’s de­par­ture from the EU by Oc­to­ber 31, come what may.

The con­cerns are hard­ly new. While John­son was still vy­ing for the lead­er­ship role against fel­low Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty MP Je­re­my Hunt, re­searcher or­ga­ni­za­tions in­clud­ing Can­cer Re­search UK have sound­ed sim­i­lar alarms. The un­cer­tain­ty around the fu­ture re­la­tion­ship be­tween the UK and oth­er coun­tries in Eu­rope has al­ready jeop­ar­dized re­searchers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in con­ti­nen­tal re­search pacts, they said.

Man­ning­ham-Buller echoes that “some dam­age has al­ready been done, with loss of re­searchers, and in­flu­ence.” And like Pamela Kearns of CRUK, she raised con­cerns about se­cur­ing mem­ber­ship in Hori­zon Eu­rope, a €100 bil­lion (£89.9 bil­lion) fund­ing pro­gram that fea­tures can­cer as one of its key mis­sions.

“While sci­ence pro­motes glob­al col­lab­o­ra­tion, the bar­ri­ers to suc­cess need to be min­i­mized, in­clud­ing with Eu­rope where our clos­est and most ex­ten­sive sci­ence re­la­tion­ships are,” the let­ter read. “That means ne­go­ti­at­ing as­so­ci­at­ed coun­try sta­tus in the EU’s ‘Hori­zon Eu­rope’ re­search pro­gramme, even if we in­tend to cre­ate our own sys­tems in the years ahead.”

It is up to John­son’s gov­ern­ment to seize the op­por­tu­ni­ty and “spend the sort of mon­ey our com­peti­tors are do­ing” — such as Ger­many — Man­ning­ham-Buller told the BBC.

“The key to this will be to en­sure that in­creased pub­lic in­vest­ment leads to an even greater pri­vate sec­tor con­tri­bu­tion to­wards the de­vel­op­ment and use of new tech­nolo­gies, in­clud­ing through pa­tient cap­i­tal,” she wrote in her let­ter.

Novartis $NVS may have given up, but Amgen $AMGN and Allergan $AGN are plowing ahead with their knockoff of Roche’s blockbuster biologic Rituxan in the United States.

Their copycat, ABP 798, was found to have a clinically equivalent impact as Rituxan — meeting the main goal of the study involving CD20-positive B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients. This is the second trial supporting the profile of the biosimilar. In January, it came through with positive PK results in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

→ BeiGene $BGNE is getting a boost in its drive to field a rival to Imbruvica. The FDA has offered an accelerated review to zanubrutinib, a BTK inhibitor that has posted positive results for mantle cell lymphoma. The PDUFA date lands on February 27, 2020. The drug scored breakthrough status at the beginning of the year.

→ BeiGene isn’t the only biopharma company to gain special regulatory status today. Mustang Bio $MBIO and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced that MB-107, a lentiviral gene therapy for the treatment of X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency, also known as bubble boy disease, has been granted Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy status.

The Trump administration is not giving up just yet. On Wednesday, the HHS filed an appeal against a judge’s decision in July to overturn a ruling obligating drug manufacturers to disclose the list price of their therapies in television adverts — hours before it was stipulated to go into effect.

In May, the HHS published a final ruling requiring drugmakers to divulge the wholesale acquisition cost— of a 30-day supply of the drug — in tv ads in a bid to enhance price transparency in the United States. The pharmaceutical industry has vehemently opposed the rule, asserting that list prices are not what a typical patient in the United States pays for treatment — that number is typically determined by the type of (or lack thereof) insurance coverage, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. Although there is truth to that claim, the move was considered symbolic in the Trump administration’s healthcare agenda to hold drugmakers accountable in a climate where skyrocketing drug prices have incensed Americans on both sides of the aisle.

During BIO this year, I had a chance to moderate a panel among some of the top tech experts in biopharma on their real-world use of artificial intelligence in R&D. There’s been a lot said about the potential of AI, but I wanted to explore more about what some of the larger players are actually doing with this technology today, and how they see it advancing in the future. It was a fascinating exchange, which you can see here. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. — John Carroll