The White House on Fri­day an­nounced new deals with nine ma­jor drug­mak­ers, fi­nal­iz­ing an end-of-year push by Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump to make good on his “most fa­vored na­tion” pledge for low­er med­i­cine prices.

Am­gen, Boehringer In­gel­heim, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb, Genen­tech, GSK, Gilead, Mer­ck, No­var­tis and Sanofi agreed to sell se­lect med­i­cines at low­ered prices along the lines of some Eu­ro­pean and oth­er com­pa­ra­ble coun­tries.

A se­nior ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cial pre­dict­ed ma­jor re­duc­tions in Med­ic­aid prices as a re­sult of the lat­est deals. They said that many of the cur­rent Med­ic­aid prices for drugs from com­pa­nies in Fri­day's deals are much high­er than what oth­er, com­pa­ra­ble coun­tries are pay­ing.

This is our fi­nal Peer Re­view in 2025. Thank you for read­ing the lat­est com­ings and go­ings for an­oth­er year. En­joy the hol­i­days, and we’ll see you again on Jan. 9!

→ Kathy Fer­nan­do has left Pfiz­er for Repli­cate Bio­science, a small self-repli­cat­ing RNA start­up in the Ap­ple Tree Part­ners web of com­pa­nies. Fer­nan­do spent 11 years at Pfiz­er, even­tu­al­ly serv­ing as SVP and glob­al head of Pfiz­er Ig­nite, a de­vel­op­ment and clin­i­cal ser­vices pro­gram for biotech part­ners. Now, she’ll be chief busi­ness of­fi­cer at Repli­cate, which inked an obe­si­ty pact with No­vo Nordisk in Au­gust and a ra­bies vac­cine deal with a Brazil­ian non­prof­it ear­li­er this month. Rachael Lester left the CBO role at Repli­cate short­ly af­ter the No­vo deal to be­come CBO at Cy­tomX Ther­a­peu­tics. Fer­nan­do was one of the first grad­u­ate stu­dents in Drew Weiss­man’s lab at UPenn. In a LinkedIn post on Tues­day, Fer­nan­do said she spent “sev­er­al months” look­ing for her “next dream job.” She found it, she wrote, and she’ll be “go­ing back to my mR­NA roots.”

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Mark­wayne Mullin (R-OK) are not see­ing eye to eye on why the Sen­ate failed to pass leg­is­la­tion reau­tho­riz­ing the FDA's rare pe­di­atric pri­or­i­ty re­view vouch­er pro­gram.

Mullin took to the Sen­ate floor on Wednes­day to urge law­mak­ers to re­new the pro­gram, with sup­port from Sens. Bill Cas­sidy (R-LA) and Mag­gie Has­san (D-NH). The trans­fer­able vouch­ers were cre­at­ed in 2012 to in­cen­tivize new drugs to treat rare pe­di­atric ill­ness­es, in­clud­ing rare can­cers and ge­net­ic dis­eases. The vouch­ers could be used to speed ap­proval of a fu­ture drug, and could al­so be sold. In re­cent years, they’ve been sold for more than $100 mil­lion each, but the pro­gram end­ed when Con­gress failed to reau­tho­rize it in late 2024.

Pri­or to last month’s se­ries of mass lay­offs in Mary­land, Catal­ent was is­sued two Form 483s for its gene ther­a­py fa­cil&s