What a year! The XBI is up, M&A is bump­ing and the vibes are im­prov­ing. But it ain’t all Christ­mas cook­ies. As has be­come our tra­di­tion, we kept track of who was up and who was down in 2025 to take stock of the year in ideas, peo­ple, drugs and com­pa­nies.

The choic­es on the End­points News win­ners and losers list are the prod­uct of hours of de­bate (re­al­ly!), a high­ly rig­or­ous sci­en­tif­ic process (... not re­al­ly) fol­lowed by ex­ten­sive peer re­view. Don’t like our picks? Bet­ter luck in 2026!

— Drew Arm­strong, Ex­ec­u­tive Ed­i­tor

Want to hear more about our picks? Join us at 12 p.m. ET to­day on Post-Hoc Live with me and the news­room to talk about who we picked, why and some pre­dic­tions for next year! 

Ear­ly re­turns sug­gest that Take­da’s $4 bil­lion im­munol­o­gy bet ap­pears to be pay­ing off.

Take­da said Thurs­day that its drug zasoc­i­tinib suc­ceed­ed in two Phase 3 stud­ies for plaque pso­ri­a­sis, com­par­ing it to both place­bo and Am­gen’s Ote­zla. For­mer­ly known as TAK-279, the drug is the oral, once-a-day TYK2 in­hibitor that was the cen­ter­piece of the 2022 deal with Nim­bus Ther­a­peu­tics in which Take­da paid $4 bil­lion up­front for the as­set.

In both stud­ies, zasoc­i­tinib hit its co-pri­ma­ry end­points of the pro­por­tion of pa­tients achiev­ing 75% or greater skin clear­ance, known as PASI 75, and a physi­cian as­sess­ment show­ing “al­most clear” skin or bet­ter af­ter 16 weeks. Take­da did not re­port spe­cif­ic fig­ures, sav­ing them for a fu­ture med­ical con­fer­ence.

Atavis­tik Bio has reeled in a $120 mil­lion Se­ries B for its pipeline of small mol­e­cules to treat blood dis­eases.

The Cam­bridge, MA, biotech is work­ing on med­i­cines for a se­vere bleed­ing dis­or­der known as hered­i­tary he­m­or­rhag­ic telang­iec­ta­sia and a group of rare, chron­ic blood can­cers called myelo­pro­lif­er­a­tive neo­plasms. The new mon­ey will fund those in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al drugs through clin­i­cal proof-of-con­cept, Atavis­tik said in its an­nounce­ment Thurs­day.

The pro­gram in he­m­or­rhag­ic telang­iec­ta­sia, an AKT1-se­lec­tive in­hibitor, will en­ter the clin­ic in the first half of 2026. Vaderis, Tec­ton­ic, Di­ag­o­nal and oth­er drug de­vel­op­ers are al­so at­tempt­ing to cre­ate med­i­cines for the dis­ease.

Atavis­tik's work in myelo­pro­lif­er­a­tive neo­plasms is fur­ther be­hind in pre­clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment. The com­pa­ny is de­vel­op­ing a JAK2 V617F mu­tant-se­lec­tive in­hibitor.