🤑For the fourth year running, Endpoints News took a comprehensive look at biopharma industry salaries, pay packages, golden parachutes and more. This is all thanks to the Herculean efforts of senior biopharma correspondent Andrew Dunn, whose spreadsheet tracking these data reaches nearly 800(!) rows. Over the course of this week, we published the following five stories:

• The 25 highest-paid biopharma CEOs: The new minimum to qualify is now an annual pay package of $25 million, up from a previous $20 million floor. Summit Therapeutics co-CEO Maky Zanganeh tops the list after making a whopping $246 million last year. The median CEO was paid $5.35 million in 2025 — up 13% from a year earlier and 58% from 2023.

• Who pays the best (and worst)?: The typical worker in biopharma made $116,648 in 2025, earning about 30% more than the typical employee of an S&P 500 company. Among 32 of the biggest life science companies, Alnylam had the highest median salary with about $312,000. The lowest was Bausch Health with a median of roughly $42,000. 

• Biopharma’s golden parachutes: In a historic stretch of M&A, a dozen biotech executives took home nearly $1 billion worth of exit packages from selling their companies. Cidara Therapeutics CEO Jeffrey Stein received the largest at about $221.7 million after Merck acquired the biotech.

• The highest-paid industry scientists: While CEOs tend to make more, the scientific leaders at biopharma companies still pull in hefty sums. Endpoints found 10 such individuals who made at least eight figures, including Eli Lilly’s Dan Skovronsky, who topped the list at about $17.8 million. 

• Oddities and eccentricities: Housing stipends and private jets and company cars — oh my! Read this story about the interesting perks biopharma executives paid for. Also included: millions of dollars for wildfire relief in California. 

📈Parabilis Medicines made its $670 million debut on the Nasdaq on Wednesday. It’s the largest biotech IPO in industry history, following almost a dozen years of research and development and about $800 million in private fundraising. 

It was no SpaceX IPO, but Parabilis CEO Mathai Mammen said the biotech industry is “going for our own moonshot right now.” He said Parabilis’ β-catenin and TCF inhibitor zolucatetide had “really encouraging data,” which sparked enthusiasm among the investor base. 

What will Parabilis do with the extra padding? Mammen said the company is heading toward Phase 3 in desmoid tumors, but added that “there are lots of tumors that we would like to pursue.” The latest raise will allow Parabilis to pursue those indications “with a bit more aggressiveness and potentially parallel process additional work in the coming years,” he said. You can see the full interview here. 

🧬The company, co-founded by Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, has raised $72 million since 2017 and developed a gene therapy for a fatal genetic disorder caused by a mutation in the NGLY1 gene. Now, it’s running out of money and options, co-founder and CEO Matt Wilsey told Endpoints’ Zachary Brennan this week. He said the company has been turned away so far from the FDA’s “plausible mechanism” program to expedite development, and doesn’t have the time or resources to resolve a sticking point around manufacturing the potential therapy.

The mission is urgent and personal to Wilsey: His daughter Grace is in the trial. NGLY1 deficiency causes neurological and other motor and liver issues in children, leaving them with a median life expectancy of only about 15 years. 

Wilsey said he’s meeting again with the FDA later this month in hopes that the agency can approve the gene therapy without the additional manufacturing data. That way, Grace could use the proceeds from its priority review voucher, which could be as much as $200 million, to finish the manufacturing steps. While it remains unclear what the FDA will do, there’s some historical precedent for the agency being flexible when it comes to gene therapies for small populations. The FDA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

🤝Though not typically known for its cancer drugs, GSK ventured further into oncology this week with a $10.6 billion buyout of Nuvalent. With the deal, the London-based biopharma nabbed two drugs on the precipice of FDA approvals and a third in early-stage testing. Nuvalent’s strategy had been to improve outcomes in small populations of lung cancer where certain mutations hinder the impact of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. 

GSK may also have gotten a discount on the deal, despite spending more than 11 figures. That’s because Nuvalent’s stock was highly volatile after the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting late last month, when a competing drug from Pfizer presented impressive data that could potentially hamper Nuvalent’s uptake. Read more here.