The hottest Biotech industry Substack posts right now

The FDA reversed its halt and will review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine. The episode shows political backlash can inject major regulatory uncertainty into vaccine approvals.
Rising vaccine skepticism is chilling the mRNA field—venture funding, manufacturing plans, and federal contracts have been cut or canceled. This threatens not just flu shots but future work on cancer vaccines, autoimmune treatments, and pandemic preparedness.
Without clearer funding and oversight, the U.S. vaccine enterprise risks being dismantled and important medical advances may be foreclosed. Congress may need to direct funds and set enforceable milestones to preserve vaccine R&D.

Chaotic, personality-driven politics distracts from deeper, long-term global trends and makes it harder to focus on real problems. There’s a growing split between technocratic, planned modernization and idiosyncratic, destabilizing governance.
The price of lab monkeys is a practical proxy for biotech activity—rising prices show a boom in testing, especially in China. Because it takes about four years to raise monkeys for trials, supply lags create big, cyclical swings in price.
Pandemic shocks, policy shifts, and supply-chain disruptions have made monkey supplies unreliable and put key research—from vaccines to neuroscience—at risk. These problems are part of a wider set of interconnected crises that tie politics, geopolitics, and science together.

PacBio agreed to pay Personal Genomics just over $23 million to license patents, settling a lawsuit and removing a legal threat.
Those payments are spread over four years, so PacBio doesn’t have to pay the full amount up front.
PacBio has about $279M in cash and is burning roughly $159M a year, leaving only about a year and a half of runway.

Regulators should insist on solid, placebo-controlled evidence that a treatment actually works and is safe before approving it, because without that any risk may be too much.
Drug companies and their investors often push for lower approval standards to make big profits, using weak comparisons or non-placebo studies to claim benefits.
Politics and media hype can pressure regulators to relax standards, which increases the chance that unproven, risky treatments reach patients and cause harm.

Roche’s new Axelios single-molecule sequencer appears to be a real engineering breakthrough that can match or beat Illumina on key metrics like read length, speed, throughput, and accuracy.
Because Roche is large, well-funded, and running global pilots, it can aggressively compete on price and scale, potentially grabbing significant market share if reuse and pricing work out.
Significant uncertainty remains due to Roche’s mixed history, pricing and purchasing-cycle risks, and execution challenges, so excellent technology doesn’t guarantee immediate market disruption.

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Robert Malone is described as an early pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology who later became a vocal critic of how those vaccines were developed and deployed.
His public warnings led to censorship and controversy, but he embraced the role of a dissenter, grew a large independent following, and gained positions like a CDC vaccine panel seat and an adjunct professorship.
The piece praises Alter.systems as a new chat AI that claims to avoid institutional bias and censorship, recommending it as a freer alternative to mainstream models.

Oxford Nanopore has selected a new CEO.
The new CEO will start in March next year.
The announcement was posted on Dec 08, 2025 and the full post is available only to paid subscribers.

Late-stage biotech companies have seen increasing value, while earlier stage companies have seen declines.
Day One Pharma is developing a drug for pediatric low-grade gliomas, showing promising results.
Important updates to look for include duration of response, safety profile, and NDA submission for Day One Pharma.