Madrigal Pharmaceuticals’ metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis drug has been approved, to be sold as Rezdiffra. For the other companies with up-and-coming treatments in the clinic, the question is: What now?

As GLP-1 drugs like Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy have spent the last couple of years skyrocketing in popularity—with no signs of slowing down—it was perhaps only a matter of time before they further shook up the pharma industry.

Biogen CMO Maha Radhakrishnan has departed the company, a spokesperson confirmed. It was her second stint at the company after she rejoined in 2020.

Two months after Keytruda became the first PD-1 drug to be approved in the U.S. in combination with chemoradiotherapy (CRT) to treat patients with stage 3 to 4a cervical cancer, Merck’s superstar immunotherapy has strengthened its resume in the indication. A pre-specified interim analysis from the KEYNOTE-A18 trial shows that the combo regimen significantly improved overall survival versus CRT alone in patients with earlier-stage cervical cancer, the company reported on Friday.

Merck’s dominance of the PD-1/L1 checkpoint inhibitor space extends to the digital realm. That is the topline finding of a study of digital marketing trends, which found Merck has the highest traffic to patient and unbranded U.S. sites about non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Geron has triumphed in its latest uphill battle. Facing questions about the trade-offs of its blood cancer drug candidate imetelstat, the biotech won over an FDA advisory committee and secured a 12 to 2 vote in its favor—triggering a surge in its share price.

The goal will be to provide an end-to-end platform that applies extra-long nanopore sequencing reads to whole genomes—initially in order to help identify variants associated with rare diseases, before expanding the project’s scope into cancer testing.