Hannah Kuchler

In the spring of 2017, celebrities and scientists gathered at the Los Angeles home of legendary television producer Norman Lear and his wife Lynn. The Hollywood power couple, outspoken supporters of myriad liberal causes, were also interested in the burgeoning field of longevity science. Among the speakers invited to update attendees on the latest advancements was Nicole Shanahan, the CEO of an intellectual property software company in Silicon Valley. Shanahan, a slight woman, with long, highlig…

The head of Google DeepMind believes its drug discovery spinout will halve the time taken to find new medicines, attracting the attention of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies which are looking to artificial intelligence to revolutionise the lengthy process. Speaking to the Financial Times, Demis Hassabis, who co-founded Google’s AI unit and also leads the drugs offshoot Isomorphic Labs, said the goal was to reduce the discovery stage — when potential drugs are identified before clini…

UK start-up Genomics has raised £35mn as it seeks to accelerate the adoption of polygenic risk scores to help people predict and prevent diseases through partnerships with healthcare systems and pharma companies. The University of Oxford spinout is pushing genetic testing beyond the search for individual genes, looking at how combinations of genes increase people’s likelihood of developing diseases such as cancer or cardiovascular conditions. Testing healthy people for single genes discovers u…

Europe needs to learn from US shareholders willing to make big bets on biotech if it wants to create a thriving homegrown industry, according to the chief executive of Argenx, one of the bloc’s largest biotech companies. Tim Van Hauwermeiren told the Financial Times that Europe has a “chicken and egg” problem: specialist healthcare funds are scarce because not enough biotechs are available to invest in — and biotechs are scarce because domestic investors do not support them. Argenx’s sharehold…

The US Food and Drug Administration will allow Florida to import medicines from Canada, making it the first state to capitalise on rules designed to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Robert Califf, the FDA commissioner, said Florida’s proposals had to demonstrate that such imports would result in “significant cost savings to consumers without adding risk of exposure to unsafe or ineffective drugs”. The US pays the highest prices in the world for drugs and studies have estimated that the co…

Japan’s sovereign development bank is investing in UK life sciences for the first time with funding for 4Bio Capital, a UK venture fund that backs advanced treatments such as cell and gene therapies. The Development Bank of Japan is investing in 4Bio, which funds companies in the UK and Europe, alongside the Japanese pharma group Kyowa Kirin, and US healthcare provider, Children’s Minnesota. 4Bio aims to raise $200mn to $300mn for its third fund — about twice as much as its last one — to inves…

More than a billion dollars worth of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral drugs procured in Europe have been wasted, according to health data, as tight controls over who can receive the medication left millions of doses unused before their expiry date. Paxlovid — designed to be given to patients shortly after they test positive for the virus — has been far easier to obtain in the US than in Europe, where access has often been restricted to the elderly or people at high risk of developing severe Covid.…

AstraZeneca is set to make one of its first acquisitions in China, announcing plans to acquire Gracell Biotechnologies for up to $1.2bn to increase its investment in cell therapies for treating cancer. The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has been trying to use its status as one of the largest drugmakers in China by sales to hunt for potential deals. But, like rival large pharmaceutical companies, it has mainly signed licensing agreements for particular drugs, rather than outright acquisitions. Under…

A century ago the makers of a revolutionary new drug called insulin promised not to make “nasty profits”. Their commitment created what is now the largest charitable foundation in the world, fuelled by the latest major development in medical science: anti-obesity drugs. The Novo Nordisk Foundation is the controlling shareholder of Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, currently Europe’s most valuable company thanks to soaring sales of weight loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic. The foundation h…

Everything about Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen is understated. The chief executive of Danish drugs group Novo Nordisk grew up on a pig farm in Jutland and from an early age was expected to muck out the animals. While most of his rivals take private jets to their appointments, he waits for commercial connections. Tall, thin and thoughtful, Jørgensen is far from the conventional image of a swashbuckling, dealmaking CEO: he started his career as an economist in the healthcare and planning department.…