Jonah Comstock

Deep-Dive As barriers rise for women’s birth control research, could men’s options finally take off?

The Oncology 2025 issue of Deep Dive is out! This one is packed with ASCO content, a fascinating story from @elmerphante.bsky.social about the intersection of animal intelligence and artificial intelligence in early cancer detection 🐶 , an interview with MIT's Andrew Lo by yours truly, and more!

pharmaphorum recently made the transition from Twitter to BlueSky for our regular news updates. We're now building up our following on this new platform. I would sincerely appreciate if my followers could @pharmaphorum.bsky.social & add us to any relevant lists and starter packs about pharma news.

FT US Pharma and Biotech Summit 2025: Live coverage Live coverage and reporting by Jonah Comstock at the FT US Pharma and Biotech Summit 2025. Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

I'm at FT Pharma and Biotech Summit today and I'll be liveblogging on pharmaphorum here:

If you can't make it in person or virtually to this great event, tune in here throughout the day for the highlights.

FDA announces generative AI pilot and rapid rollout plans

BREAKING: FDA announces a successfully completed generative AI pilot for speeding up drug review -- and rapid rollout plans.

Don't forget to join our webinar, developed in partnership with
@altmetric.com to learn how digital insights and real-world data are being integrated into #medicalaffairs strategy www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9977...
We're going to start soon!
#PPwebinar

Op-ed: Pharma must show courage, leadership on public health Pharma companies can't claim to care about global patient wellbeing unless they stand up to Trump's public health cuts.

I wrote an op-ed about the importance of pharma standing up for public health in this unprecedented moment.

pharmaphorum.com/patients/op-...

Friday scoop from me.

Seth Ginsberg of the Global Healthy Living Foundation giving a great talk on fighting misinformation:

"We cannot let some TikTok influencer with a ring light and an opinion control the patient narrative." #REpharmaUSA

Today -- where I have been parked in a session largely about health equity -- has been much better about speakers speaking out about the current political situation. I appreciate the speakers who are bravely speaking the truth. #REpharmaUSA

Really striking graphic shared by Gilead's Kesha O'Reilly showing how much access different parts of the country have to clinical trials. The darker blocks have better access and lighter areas have worse access. #REpharmaUSA

"We want as many patients as possible to have access to our drugs. ... But the thing is, that's the scariest thing in the world for a payer," Restivo says. "Who is the right patient? That's what we want to communicate. And has the data really set us up for that?" #REpharmaUSA

A good insight from Bayer's Jennifer Rustivo about PBMs. While HEOR researchers focus on total cost of care, PBMs, who control 80% of covered lives in the US, are really only interested in pharmacy costs. #REpharmaUSA

Sometimes that's a particular disease state and sometimes it's a specific population demographic. But payers and health systems don't want general data, they want specific data about their population, Unni says. #REpharmaUSA

"It is kind of difficult for people who have worked in pharma their entire career to understand what really happens in a payer environment or a health system," Sanjay Unni says. "...People in our industry lack understanding about how payers are uniquely interested in their populations." #REpharmaUSA

Boehringer Ingelheim's Paul Petraro and Sanjay Unni are discussing the concept of "holistic real-world evidence". The be-all and end-all of data collection is no longer the clinical trial, Petraro says. The data lifecycle is much longer and has to be considered in full from the start. #REpharmaUSA

Despite Trump's DEI purge, CMS's Health Equity Index in star ratings and Enhancing Oncology Model are still online. #REpharmaUSA

"There's a growing recognition of health equity concerns and the importance of social drivers of health," Grossman says. "And I don't think this is going away. I think there is still importance in looking at this." #REpharmaUSA

Today I'm in the "Value-Driven" session and it's starting off with a great talk by Bayer's Jamie Grossman about health equity in oncology -- a topic that's never been more important. #REpharmaUSA

It was a good session but my brain is totally fried so you might have to wait for my piece on it to hear my thoughts/takeaways. I'll be back with more Reuters coverage tomorrow.

Last panel of the day is a panel sponsored by pharmaphorum's parent company EVERSANA. It's focused on direct-to-patient access models, a topic I'm genuinely very excited for. #REpharmaUSA

Chema Avila from Sanofi is up now in the AI track at #REpharmaUSA. He says that Netflix has primed us all to expect a seamless experience from an algorithm that just gets us. Omnichannel marketing is not cutting it when patients and HCPs have that expectation.

By the way I'm learning all this from Joe Daley, President, Addison Whitney and Dorothy Linvill-Neal, Director, Nomenclature Development and Strategy, Regeneron.

Brand name confusion in pharma is a safety issue -- 33% of medication errors are caused by drug name confusion. That's why FDA and EMA get involved and have to approve names. In a completely separate process from the trademark process. #REpharmaUSA

Two years covering pharma and this is the first time I've attended a session about drug naming. Who knew there was so much to it!? #REpharmaUSA

Incidentally, this is the downside to using an app for Q&A. Makes it very easy to censor inconvenient questions.

My question is “waiting for review”. Several others have been approved since I sent it. Disappointing. #REpharmaUSA

Interesting insight from PhRMA's Michael Ybarra about PBM reform. I have often wondered "if there's such a broad consensus PBM reform is needed, why hasn't it happened?". Ybarra says different stakeholders have different grievances with PBMs, so reform efforts aren't always unified. #REpharmaUSA

This is kind of a surreal experience at #REpharmaUSA. This panel is all about preventative medicine & panelists are talking about vaccination and food as medicine, but no one is talking about the fact that there's a famous vaccine denier heading up HHS and the Trump administration just killed USAID.

" If you want to be truly competitive, you have to constantly think about what could go wrong and react to it -- and the reaction can't take three or four months. ... Being competitive means having a plan in place that we can use immediately." -- Kavya Gopal, Head of US Oncology, GSK #REpharmaUSA

Can pharma really call itself "agile" when it takes a year to make a TV ad and 12 years to develop a drug? GSK's Kavya Gopal asks. Yes! pharma's digital transformation during COVID-19 proves it. #REpharmaUSA