Radically different
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Good morning. A lot of people had reactions, comments, and theories regarding Lizzy’s story yesterday on the mystery patient who received retatrutide. What’s undeniable, though, is the strength of Lizzy’s reporting.
A startup developing treatments for eye diseases has raised $330 million from investors as it readies for late-stage testing.
Ollin Biosciences is about to begin a Phase 3 trial of a treatment for both diabetic macular edema and wet age-related macular degeneration. The conditions affect millions of Americans and can lead to vision loss.
Ahead of the trial, Ollin told STAT it had raised the Series B funding from an assortment of established biotech investors, a pension fund, and even crossover investors — a breed of private investors who will take a stake in a company shortly before it moves over to the stock market. TCGX and ARCH Venture Partners co-led the funding round, which was one of the largest Series B rounds for a biotech company in the last two years.
SAN DIEGO—California’s three life sciences clusters all lost jobs last year, yet the industry remains a major engine of innovation and economic growth, according to a report released by the state’s largest life sciences organization to coincide with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) International Convention being held here.
BIOCOM California quantified the economic impact of the Golden State’s life sciences industry as generating $394 billion in economic output in 2025—a figure that goes beyond the direct impact of the 406,505 people employed by life sciences employers across the state. The impact figure includes indirect impact (activity generated through suppliers, vendors, and subcontractors supporting the industry) and induced impact (the household spending generated by workers employed in both life-sci organizations and supporting industries).
When indirect and induced impact are accounted for, the life sciences sustain 1,079,365 jobs statewide, the report stated.
However, all three of the state’s top-tier life-sci clusters—the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and the Los Angeles/Orange County region—saw decreases in employment within the industry last year, according to the report.
San Francisco ranks second in the latest edition of GEN’s nationally-quoted A-List of Top 10 U.S. Biopharma Clusters, unchanged from a year ago, while San Diego slid one position to sixth, and LA/Orange County slipped one notch to eighth.
“California, like the other states in the country, are still showing the effects of the pandemic and the recovery from that, because it was such a large run up of investment and hiring and building of new space, followed by a pretty significant drop off in 2022, 23,” Tim Scott BIOCOM California’s president and CEO, explained in an interview with GEN conducted at the organization’s booth within the convention’s exhibition floor.
“And then we have the continued biotech winter that’s been caused mostly through the instability at the federal level in terms of policy,” Scott added.
He cited NIH funding cuts, the delay in re-authorizing the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) seed funding programs, tariffs, and the “most favorite nation” drug pricing framework championed by the Trump administration as a vehicle for lowering drug prices: “All of these things have led the industry and the investors in the industry to pause.”
Most of the life-sci job decline was concentrated in the Bay Area and San Diego regions, which together accounted for 88% of job losses.
The San Francisco Bay Area saw its life-sci workforce slide 2.7% from 2024 to 137,779 jobs last year, driven mainly by decreasing employment in scientific/research tools, biotechnology, and biopharmaceuticals. The San Diego region finished 2025 with 61,866 jobs, a 2.55% decline from the previous year, due primarily to the loss of jobs in the R&D in physical, engineering, and life sciences and electromedical and electrotherapeutic apparatus manufacturing sectors.
Greater Los Angeles, which BIOCOM California defines as Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, saw its employment base shrink 0.5% year-over-year, to 143,153 last year, with the largest employment decrease coming in drug wholesaler positions. Orange County’s life-sci workforce also dipped by 0.5%, sliding to 57,213 jobs, driven by cuts in scientific/research tools and medical devices and equipment employment—though Orange County also saw increases in biotechnology and research and testing jobs.
“In spite of the slight decrease in growth this year, we’re still at about $400 billion in economic output for California in the life sciences. That’s the second largest industry in California,” Scott said. “It’s still a significant driver of economic activity and of innovation.”
Another driver of innovation, NIH funding, stayed flat last year compared to 2024 at $5.23 billion for all of California. But the number of NIH awards statewide fell 8.5% from 9,384 in 2024 to 8,587 in 2025.
Life science manufacturing jobs fell by 2.1% last year to 143,572 jobs, though they still accounted for more than one-third (35.3%) of all of the industry jobs in the state. Across 31 life science industry sub-sectors, 23 recorded job losses, with the largest declines in medical laboratories and R&D within the physical, engineering, and life sciences job category.
But the state’s life-sci manufacturing segment is eventually expected to grow as drug developers either strive to meet growing demand, reshore their production in the United States to avoid tariffs, or both. Gilead Sciences began construction in September 2025 of a new 180,000 square-foot development and manufacturing facility, part of a companywide $32 billion U.S. investment strategy. Two months later, Novartis opened a 10,000-square-foot radioligand therapy (RLT) manufacturing facility for cancer treatments in Carlsbad, CA, the pharma giant’s third U.S.-based RLT site.
While biopharmas and contract manufacturers have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in new projects, projects announced for California remain mostly under construction, so hiring levels have not yet risen to account for the new manufacturing activity, Scott said.
Two more potential challenges loom for California life science companies—one from Washington, the other from Sacramento.
Scott said BIOCOM California is paying attention to federal efforts aimed at further scrutinizing activity between U.S. and Chinese biopharmas.
Earlier this month, Reps. John Moolenaar (R-MI), chairman of the Select Committee on China, and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-MI), introduced the Biotech Investment National Security Act (BINSA). BINSA would amend the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, enacted last year, by adding pharmaceutical and biological product development to the list of sectors subject to screening of investments by the U.S. government.
The measure would subject U.S. pharmaceutical licensing deals, joint ventures, and equity investments with Chinese covered foreign persons to U.S. Treasury Department review, as well as explicitly cover licensing deals involving technology and intellectual property. BINSA also requires the Secretary of War (formerly Defense) to assess within 60 days whether U.S. capital investment in Chinese biotechnology negatively affects national security and military readiness.
“We’re trying to find the balance between protecting American interests with regard to intellectual property and also competing with China. And we’re balancing that with cooperating with China,” Scott said. “You can imagine a politician in Washington, D.C., wants to really protect our interests. A biotech entrepreneur in California wants to go anywhere in the world to find resources to be able to move their drug toward the clinic.”
According to California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), recent tax collection data shows that fewer than 100 corporate taxpayers in California would be affected. LAO has estimated that the proposal would raise $850 million in 2026–27, since the cap would only apply to part of the fiscal year, and $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion annually between 2027–28 and 2029–30.
However, the R&D credit likely accounts for most of the proposal’s fiscal effect, according to the LAO, since the R&D credit accounts for the overwhelming majority of business credit usage and carry-forward balances. And the roughly 100 affected businesses include many of the largest biopharma giants, Scott said.
“That is a really big tool for engaging pharma and encouraging investment in California. Without the R&D tax credit, companies are less likely to want to invest in California,” Scott asserted. “The R&D tax credit has had a direct effect on driving the growth of the biotech industry in California.”
The post California Still Golden Despite Job Losses: Industry Group appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
When I was 18, I skipped my high school graduation and headed to Kuwait. It was 1991, the first Gulf War had just ended, and the country was in complete chaos. There was little to no electricity, aside from generator power. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Massive oil fires lit up the desert and dimmed the sky overhead. Everything had to be rebuilt, and fast.
I was there to work on that reconstruction, part of an international effort to fix what war had broken. It was the first time I’d ever seen a truly massive engineering project with my own eyes. The challenge was one that had to be addressed on multiple fronts, simultaneously, to get an entire country back up and running.
Everywhere you looked, there was something to do. I was mostly working with a labor crew to jump on quick fixes to things like windows and doors blown out in the fighting. But there were, of course, bigger jobs too. Most notably, there were those massive fires to put out. The Iraqi army had set hundreds of oil wells ablaze, the majority of which were still spewing soot and oil smoke into the air. On bad days, the sky would remain dark all day, and the air would burn your eyes and hurt your throat.
It was so apocalyptic that none other than Carl Sagan warned of massive environmental consequences. If smoke from the oil fires reached the stratosphere, he predicted, the result could be akin to the 1815 explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which triggered what’s known as “the year without a summer”; global temperatures dropped between 0.4 and 0.7 °C, and crops failed around the world. Fortunately, the plume from Kuwait never made it that high, and although temperatures did decline regionally, there was little effect on a planetary scale. As it turns out, predicting what will or won’t lower global temps is quite hard. (Reader, I am foreshadowing here.)
Firefighters from companies with monikers like the Red Adair Company or Boots and Coots (as well as less colorfully named outfits, like Bechtel) rushed to Kuwait after the war’s end to figure out how to extinguish the gargantuan blazes and cap the wells. At a hotel in downtown Kuwait City, one of the few places with working phone lines, I would occasionally run into them covered head to toe in black oil and soot.
Putting out the fires took all sorts of creative thinking. Engineers working in the burning oil fields figured out they could repurpose existing pipelines meant to pump oil out to sea to instead pump water in from the Persian Gulf. One company from Hungary rigged up a firefighting machine called Big Wind by outfitting an old Soviet T-34 tank chassis with two turbines from a MiG-21 fighter jet, each of which could blast 220 gallons of water per second. Sadly, I never got to see it in action (except in the movies).
Other jobs were less cinematic but no less dire. The retreating Iraqi army had left booby traps all over. They snaked hand grenades into the plumbing (at a facility where I worked, among others). They planted mines everywhere, and those had to be found and removed. Many of them were small plastic “toe poppers” designed not to kill but to maim. Hunting them was a herculean effort. And although it was mostly successful, hundreds of thousands of them, by some estimates, still remain.
Which is to say, we can’t fix everything. But we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity.
That’s what the July/August issue of MIT Technology Review is all about. Sometimes the challenges we face are giant, if knowable, like tunneling beneath the seafloor. Some exist at the nanoscale and represent decades of investment and research, as is the case with ASML, a company with the singular ability to produce the machines that make the most advanced computer chips in the world. Others represent problems at a planetary scale and take us into truly unknown territory, like a future where we could engineer the veil of the Tambora volcano to cool the Earth on purpose.
By the end of my 90-day contract in Kuwait, instead of damage everywhere you looked you could see the fruits of a gargantuan international rebuilding effort. The air was not clean, exactly, but inhaling it no longer felt like smoking a pack a day. On the beach, which had been pocked with mines, people swam and splashed at the edge of the gulf. The lights were on. Water ran from the taps. The markets were open. It was a remarkably different place.
Yes, forces both within and beyond our control will always break things. People will invariably make mistakes, or act out of their own self-interest to the detriment of others. But we can also come together to get to work and, when the smoke clears, find we’ve made real progress.
As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan.
Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, in a wispy-thin layer known as the stratosphere. Then it will use a custom-built antenna to supplement Softbank’s 5G network, a test that will include beaming data straight to devices.
Sceye (pronounced “sky”) is one of several firms building a class of airborne craft called HAPS, or high-altitude platform stations or systems. Such a platform can be a plane or a balloon or, yes, an oblong craft filled with helium and outfitted with solar panels. HAPS companies, including the Airbus subsidiary Aalto, envision them serving a variety of lofty purposes, such as delivering internet service to disaster sites and observing Earth’s surface.
The stratosphere is a good place to be if you want to cover a large area. It’s also much closer to the ground than even the lowest-orbiting satellites, which means sending down a signal takes far less energy. “What we ultimately offer is space-like conditions, without the cost of going to space and without the complexity of being in orbit,” says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye’s CEO and founder.
But it’s also not so easy to stay there. Sceye’s aircraft, Frandsen says, has to be light enough to stay aloft but also strong enough to carry the necessary systems. It must soak up and store enough solar energy during the day to provide around-the-clock power to an electric fan that can maneuver the HAPS back into place when winds knock it out of position—mettle it proved in a 2024 test flight.
Since then, Sceye has been preparing for its big Japan test. In the flight pictured here from this spring, for example, the craft stayed aloft for 12 days as it flew to the coast of Brazil and spent more than 88 hours “parked” in various locations. Eventually, the company expects its platform could help satellite operators better serve densely populated areas.
Someday, Frandsen says, spotting a HAPS may be as common as seeing ships at port or trains on the tracks.
What if you could precisely change the genome of a pre-implantation human embryo and then safely use that embryo to try to generate a healthier person? It’s a wild idea, but one that technology over the past decade has steadily made a bit less fantastical, at least practically speaking.
But even as CRISPR gene-editing research has advanced, including exciting work reported in a new preprint on base editing of human embryos from geneticist Dieter Egli’s lab at Columbia, the same tough ethical questions remain.
Journalists don’t usually appear in the byline of peer-reviewed scientific papers. But recently, I received an email I’d been waiting on for nearly three years: A prestigious journal had accepted the findings from a study I helped lead with more than 20,000 participants across all 50 states. It was published Tuesday evening in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
My team at NPR had joined forces with physiologist Keith Diaz’s at Columbia University Medical Center to test his lab findings. Specifically, we invited people to try taking movement breaks every 30 minutes, every hour, or every two hours. Our goal was to test whether short walking breaks, which have been shown to offset some of the damage of our sedentary, screen-bound lives, were actually feasible out in the real world.
Time spent in daylight could lower the risk of dementia and offer extra benefits for people at particularly high risk, new research suggests. The findings, published in General Psychiatry, could provide a low-cost way to support brain health.
Having less than 0.7 hours of bright daytime light per day was a stronger predictor of dementia than six traditional risk factors. Moderately bright natural light exposure—equivalent to an overcast day outdoors—was linked with a 16% reduction in the risk of dementia.
“Daytime light exposure may serve as a novel indicator of dementia risk,” said researcher Hongliang Feng, PhD, from Guangzhou Medical University in China. Natural cycles of darkness at night followed by bright light during the day are fundamental to entrain circadian rhythms. These regulate physiology, behavior, and cognition, with circadian disruptions common among people with dementia.
Noting that modern lifestyles limit daytime exposure to natural light, the researchers investigated exposure to day- and nighttime light using actigraphy devices that track body movements with built-in light sensors.
The study included 87,577 UK Biobank participants who wore accelerometers on their wrists to measure physical activity and natural light exposure for seven days. Over a median follow-up of 8.1 years, 741 of these people (0.85%) developed dementia.
Higher daytime light, both in terms of average exposure and the duration in bright light, was significantly associated with a lower dementia risk. Daytime light exposure above 1000 lux—a moderately bright light level equal to an overcast day outdoors—was associated with a hazard ratio of 0.84 for dementia. Longer exposure to brighter light of at least 0.70 hours with at least 5000 lux was linked with a further risk reduction, and a hazard ratio of 0.83.
In exploratory analyses, circadian rest-activity rhythms (CRAC) and brain structures mediated up to a third of this association, supporting the idea that improvements in circadian rhythms may have contributed to these results. Dementia protection from light exposure was stronger in people with high levels of nighttime light exposure, those with a “night owl” evening chronotype, or who carried the APOE ε4 allele, with a risk reduction of up to 41%.
Having more than 0.7 hours per day of bright daytime light of at least 5000 lux outperformed the established dementia risk predictors, including alcohol consumption, obesity, air pollution, hearing loss, use of vitamin D supplements, and traumatic brain injury.
However, nighttime light showed no significant association with dementia risk.
The findings point to the importance of higher daytime light exposure in reducing the chances of dementia and offer a simple, cost-free way to reduce this risk.
“Practical implementation pathways could include optimizing indoor lighting at home, community‐based outdoor activity promotion programs, and workplace lighting modifications designed to increase daytime light exposure, such as ensuring adequate illumination and access to natural light,” the researchers suggested.
They added: “Our findings underscore a more pronounced protective association of daytime light exposure in individuals with higher average nighttime light exposure, an evening chronotype, or APOE ε4 carrier status.
“In other words, these findings suggest a targeted approach to mitigate dementia risk by increasing daytime light levels for these populations.”
The post More Daylight Exposure Could Lower Dementia Risk appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.