Boehringer Ingelheim’s corporate senior vice president, head of global regions, Timmo Rousku Andersen, outlines at a recent summit the company’s reshaped approach to digital innovation and the need to entrench an execution bias to scale transformation initiatives.

Oversee returnee-founded Chinese biotech start-ups Nuwacell and Arnatar secure $14m in series A and seed rounds respectively, while four other major deals backed by private equity and venture capital firms raise a combined $116m.

In this week's podcast edition of Five Must-Know Things: a look at Alzheimer’s drug development; US-China decoupling irks Chinese biotech firms; seven potential blockbuster approvals in 2023; Novo Nordisk’s cardiovascular strategy; and a look at the vaccine and drug pipeline for monkeypox.

VC funding slowed recently, but public company financings kept up a brisk pace with follow-on public offerings for Allakos and Alpine, private placements for Ventyx and Syros, and Albireo’s royalty deal. In restructuring updates, Biogen raised $592m in a real estate deal and Acerus is assessing options.

After the Aduhelm controversy, Biogen has another neurodegenerative disease drug which so far can only show efficacy against surrogate biomarkers – will the FDA be swayed again this time?

Discussion of the launch trajectory for the twice-yearly cholesterol therapy dominated the marketing portion of Novartis’s investor event and the firm is confident the foundations have been laid to push strong sales growth by the second half of next year.

South Korea moves to lay out clearer accounting guidelines related to R&D costs for pharma and biotech companies, making improvements to earlier official guidance in 2018 in order to ease uncertainties and help foster the sector.

After the Aduhelm controversy, Biogen has another neurodegenerative disease drug which so far can only show efficacy against surrogate biomarkers – will the FDA be swayed again this time?

With a European approval in the bag for Tezspire, AstraZeneca is looking for quick and successful launches of the severe asthma drug so it can mount a challenge to the other biologics in the space, notably Sanofi and Regeneron’s Dupixent.

Biotech CEOs often express surprise when the FDA rejects their drugs. But collaborative interactions between regulators and drug sponsors count for little if the latter fail to adjust their clinical and regulatory efforts accordingly.

Special guest, Citeline's Annie Siu, discusses the recent ESMO meeting and Jiangsu Hengrui and BeiGene's PD-1 data for hepatocellular carcinoma in this latest episode of the Chinese-language China Biotech podcast.

Deal Snapshot: The Dutch biotech planned to move its preclinical candidate, the EGFR-targeting LAVA-1223, into the clinic later this year. Seagen has shown interest in business development as Merck merger talks have quieted down.