Clinical trials are frightening endeavors for biotech investors. Expensive and fraught with risk, a trial’s failure can seriously lighten an investor’s pockets with little hope of recourse. After gaining approval from global insurance marketplace Lloyd’s of London, a new partnership is set to use a machine learning algorithm to offer investors insurance on clinical trial funding.

When it comes to developing new pain drugs, the placebo effect is a powerful but baffling force. It’s well known that expectation alone can be enough to provide pain relief, even if the “treatment” is a sham with no real medical benefit. Though the relief provided by a placebo can be enough to make clinical trials for new pain medications fail, how our brains produce such strong pain relief through belief alone is largely a mystery.

Three months after scoring FDA approval for a hemophilia B gene therapy, Pfizer has posted phase 3 data suggesting it may be able to pull off the same success with a different candidate in hemophilia A.

OSE Immunotherapeutics is hoping to show Servier what they walked away from. Around one year after the French drugmakers split up, the biotech has reported midphase data on an anti-IL-7 antibody lusvertikimab in ulcerative colitis showing a potential improvement in symptoms.

Organ transplant preservation company Paragonix Technologies is launching the first FDA-cleared system for protecting donated pancreas tissue.

Roche has filed a lawsuit against Stanford University and its spinout Foresight Diagnostics, saying the young cancer test developer was built upon trade secrets it acquired for detecting tumor DNA in the bloodstream.

Radiopharmaceutical company Pentixapharm is picking up fellow Germany-based Glycotope’s target discovery unit for an undisclosed sum in order to double its pipeline courtesy of a portfolio of preclinical cancer antibodies.

The FDA has greenlit its first point-of-care diagnostic test for hepatitis C, capable of using only a fingerstick blood sample, in a bid to quickly connect patients with antiviral drugs.

Crosswalk Therapeutics has strolled over to Codexis to pick up Fabry and Pompe disease compounds that remain from an abandoned Takeda gene therapy collaboration.

Annovis Bio has published its delayed phase 3 Parkinson’s disease data, reporting success in subgroups and secondary endpoints while skirting the question of whether the candidate moved the needle on the main goal.