Bionest

Gilead and Galapagos

With Gilead Sciences’ hepatitis C sales revenues from Solvaldi and Harvoni fading and lower than expected Yescarta sales, the company has been looking for new products to bolster its pipeline. In mid-July, Gilead addressed some of this need by deepening ties to an existing partner, Galapagos. The two companies have formed a 10-year, $5.1 billion...

Bionest

Machine Learning and Drug R&D

We recently wrote about the growing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. That blog post talked primarily about the expanding applications of AI in clinical diagnostics, based on AI’s superior abilities in pattern recognition. Within the pharmaceutical industry, however, machine learning technologies hold the most potential for revolutionizing drug discovery and...

Bionest

Happy New Year — Some Thoughts on the Year to Come

Welcome to 2019. We hope you enjoyed the holidays and look forward to meeting and greeting many of you next week in San Francisco for Biotech Week. Several members of the Bionest team will be in attendance, and if you’d like to get together, we look forward to hearing from you.   Last year, we...

Bionest

Innovations in Electronic Health Records

Increasingly, hospital and health systems have moved from paper charts to electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs offer ways to streamline clinical workflows, reduce medical errors and increase patient safety, and provide stronger support for clinical decision-making. However, linking such records from different locations for the same patient has proved problematic in many cases, leading to...

Bionest

Moving from Exploratory Collaborations to Record-Setting Deals in IO

In early March, we wrote about the collaboration between Bristol-Myers Squibb and Nektar aimed at developing Nektar’s T-cell stimulating molecule NKTR-214 in combination with BMS’s checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo (nivolumab). That deal brought Nektar an eye-opening $1.85 billion in upfront cash and investments for a share of its development-stage drug, with the potential for an additional...

Bionest

Setting (Financial) Records in I/O

 On February 14, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and Nektar announced the largest-ever deal in history involving a single development-stage drug in a partnership that greatly expands combination testing of BMS’s checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo (nivolumab) and Nektar’s T-cell stimulating molecule NKTR-214.   Many recent immuno-oncology collaborations have involved cost sharing but no other financial transactions, and the...

Bionest

See you at ASCO 2016!

It’s nearly June, which means one thing for the Bionest Oncology team:  ASCO is right around the corner.  As we gear up for our time in Chicago, we are taking a look at some of the big topics and anticipated data we expect to see during the conference. The theme of ASCO this year is...

Bionest

“Beyond the Pill,” Part One: Value-Added Services Increasingly Needed Due to Changing Nature of Therapies

The notion of patient-centricity has gained increasing attention from drug developers and others in recent years, mostly in the area of chronic diseases and those requiring complex therapies. But value-added services, which go beyond simple initiatives addressed to patient compliance and access to therapy, are also gaining increasing attention from a variety of other audiences,...

Bionest

Making a “Moonshot” Against Cancer

President Obama, in his 2016 State of the Union Address, called on Vice President Biden to lead a new national “Moonshot” to “eliminate cancer as we know it.” The White House has since announced a billion dollar initiative — inspired by recent successes in the areas of cancer immunotherapy and multi-drug combinations — to jump-start this...

Bionest

Visit Us at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference – Jan 11-14 in San Francisco!

We are looking forward to attending the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference again January 11-14, 2016, in San Francisco.   Three of Bionest’s leaders, Alain J. Gilbert, Olivier Lesueur, and Bob Easton, will be available to meet one-on-one for 30 minutes in our private suite, between Monday Jan 11 and Thursday Jan 14.   For Bionest,...