Merck KGaA is nearing a deal to acquire SpringWorks Therapeutics Inc., people familiar with the matter said.
An announcement may come as soon as Monday, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information. A deal could value SpringWorks at about $3.5 billion, according to one of the people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-24/merck-nears-deal-to-buy-springworks-therapeutics
A federal judge on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump's administration from withholding federal funding from several so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with the Republican's hardline immigration crackdown.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued the injunction at the behest of 16 cities and counties nationally led by San Francisco which in a lawsuit filed in February argued the administration was unlawfully trying to force local officials to cooperate with federal immigration arrests.
Since 2021, the left has waged a veritable war against the American legal system in a variety of ways.
One serial target of Democrats and the Left has been the Supreme Court.
In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke to an angry throng of pro-abortion protestors assembled at the very doors of the court chambers.
He threatened two of the justices, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, by name. Schumer yelled to the volatile crowd that the justices’ views would make them “reap the whirlwind,” and the two would not know what “hit” them.
In the ensuing months, protestors mobbed some of the conservative justices’ homes—likely committing felonies. The sympathetic Biden Justice Department chose not to follow the law, and so did nothing—although eventually a would-be assassin turned up.
Joe Biden himself bragged that he would try to ignore the Supreme Court ruling banning his arbitrary cancellation of billions of dollars in student loans. Indeed, he boasted, “The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me.”
In response, no one on the left ever complained about endangering the “rule of law” or Biden as “a dictator.”
For three years, four local, state, and federal prosecutors warped the law to neuter Donald Trump. Most of the charges had never been brought against other political figures in similar circumstances.
The vast majority of the 93 weaponized indictments backfired on the liberal prosecutors, who had contorted the legal system for political purposes and now face their own ethical or legal quagmires.
The federal prosecutor Jack Smith belatedly reported accepting $140,000 in free legal services.
Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis was removed from the Trump case and fined, and is now under further investigation.
New York prosecutor Letitia James is now facing allegations of falsification of documents and loan fraud.
Federal immigration law prohibits the illegal entry into and residence within the United States. Yet the Biden administration deliberately violated the law by allowing somewhere between 10-12 million illegal aliens to cross the border. Thousands had criminal records.
No one on the left decried any of these various affronts to the legal system.
In polls, by overwhelming majorities—above 70 percent—the public wants the Trump administration to close the border, begin deportations, and start with criminals or those with violent histories and gang ties.
The recent deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, to the vast majority of Americans seems to fit that profile.
Garcia entered the U.S. illegally and was later found consorting with members of M-13—a State Department-designated terrorist organization—who were selling drugs. Informants reported that he was a gang member. His own tattoos likely confirm those accusations.
Two prior immigration judges found such evidence sufficient to allow deportation proceedings. In 2019, a third judge allowed Garcia to stay temporarily, but only on the grounds that hostile gangs might harm him should he return to El Salvador.
Garcia was pulled over for speeding without a driver’s license—but with eight illegal aliens who reportedly all lived at the Garcia residence. The officer released him, despite suspicions that Garcia was engaged in human trafficking.
Garcia’s live-in girlfriend, now wife, was physically assaulted by Garcia on two occasions, suffered injuries, and initially sought restraining orders against him.
The left claims Garcia is a “Maryland man” without an arrest record.
But he is not a U.S. citizen or a legal resident of Maryland. Instead, Garcia is in legal limbo and remains what he always was—a citizen of El Salvador with gang ties and formerly residing illegally in the U.S.
Garcia is now back home on El Salvadorian soil and was mistakenly sent to a high-security prison. But his own government in El Salvador will ultimately decide how involved Garcia is or was with M-13 gangs. And then, as a sovereign nation, it will act according to its own policies about its own citizens’ associations with that terrorist organization.
The left has demanded that Garcia be returned to the U.S. He has become a cause célèbre as a purported victim of the supposedly fascist Trump. Returning Garcia is seen by leftists as a performance art-act to derail the Trump agenda, which otherwise they have neither the power nor public support to thwart.
The left also ignores its own hypocrisies and ironies.
Those who weaponized the court system and destroyed the border now rail that Trump is acting unlawfully by not returning an illegal alien, an M-13 member, and a domestic abuser with a propensity to ignore our laws.
How ironic that those who rail about colonialism now sound like 19th-century Yankee imperialists.
Democrats do not own El Salvador—although they act like it when dictating to its government that El Salvador cannot detain one of its own citizens on its own soil for its own reasons.
Unfortunately, junk science is quite common. Myriad systemic pressures have led to this point, but we now must face the difficult task of combating it. This is a tale of just how difficult it is to root out and eliminate obvious junk science.
Publish or perish. It’s the well-known, pithy way to sum up academic life. You either see your name in black and white, or you are shown the door. In some ways, it makes perfect sense. When you’re supposed to be a leading scholar in an area, the primary way to demonstrate that is through publishing. However, as funding for research became harder and harder to acquire, publishing became even more difficult.
Science is expensive. Collecting data takes time, people, and lots of money. Studies often take years to conduct. That’s a lot of time, effort, and money to then go through peer review only to hear some version of “No, thank you likely.” It’s therefore only natural that when there is a demand, someone, or many someones, will find a way to meet it.
Predatory Journals
Predatory journals have been discussed in the scientific community for a long time. Beall’s List was the first attempt at quantification. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. I personally average around five emails per day from obviously predatory journals. It’s always the same playbook:
For example:
Dear Dr. Suleta,
We are genuinely very impressed with your work in _______________ (insert topic area/article). As a content expert, we would like to inform you of a new journal/special issue that we are planning and we’d love for you to submit a manuscript! If you could send it to us no later than __________ (usually two weeks from the date of email), it will be included in the next issue.
But predatory journals are only half the problem. People submitting to them are the other half. Anyone and everyone can get their “research” published in one of these journals that don’t actually conduct peer review. Recently, Andrea Love and I did a takedown of an obvious, politically charged “study” in an extremely dubious journal.
Even when a journal isn’t predatory, dishonest, and junk science, it can still make it through peer review. When that happens, it’s incredibly difficult to get an article retracted. For example, the notorious Wakefield MMR “study” took years to be retracted officially.
A Retractors Tale
In August 2024, I wrote a piece about blatant conflicts of interest in a case study involving the treatment of twins with autism. Since then, I’ve been in regular correspondence with the journal about this particular article. It began with filing a complaint about my specific concerns.
“It appears as though the lead author may have some conflicts of interest (COI) through his affiliations with Documenting Hope, Epidemic Answers, and Protren. Given that supplements and homeopathic remedies were used to treat the children in this case report, that
supplement and homeopathy companies sponsor Epidemic Answers and Documenting Hope, and his affiliation with Protren, it gives the strong appearance of a conflict of interest. Yet, nothing was documented in the COI section of the case report, despite both Documenting Hope and Epidemic Answers being cited in the Therapeutic Interventions section, as well as his joint affiliation with the University of Maryland and Documenting Hope in the authorship line.
Is there a process for looking into these potential COIs?”
Nearly two months later, I finally received a response:
“Dear Ms. Suleta,
I would like to provide you with an update regarding the complaint you submitted.
The Editorial Office has conducted a thorough investigation in consultation with our Editorial Board and Ethics Committee. We have determined that the identified potential conflict of interest did not affect the interpretation of the work or the recommendations made by the editors and peer reviewers. To ensure full transparency, we propose to publish a correction to the paper that will fully disclose the conflict of interest. This course of action is in alignment with the recommendations provided by our Editorial Board.”
After a few exchanges about the potential timeline for the update, there was radio silence. I checked the paper every month, thinking that the COI section would surely be updated since, well, it’s “just” a COI section. November passed, then December. January and February, too. No change to the COI section. I sent another email inquiring about the change in March with the following response.
“Dear Dr. Suleta,
Thank you very much for your email.
After the investigation, we have drawn the conclusion that the paper will be retracted. We are preparing the materials for the retraction of this paper.
In case of any questions, please feel free to contact us.”
So that’s it, right? Case closed! We can officially declare victory!
Except the paper is still up, and I have not been provided with the expected timeline for retraction. As the Wakefield example demonstrates, it can take a long time. It can depend upon further investigation, author appeals, and more. Meanwhile, the article is still up without an updated COI section or a disclaimer earmarking it as under investigation.
The Walking Dead
Even if it is eventually retracted, zombie citations are a real problem. Retraction Watch keeps a running tally of the top 10 most highly cited retracted papers and the number of times they’ve been cited before and after retraction. Spoiler alert: some papers have been cited post-retraction over 1,000 times. That is junk science, marked as junk and allowed to permeate scientific discourse after it was officially declared null and void. This junk science continues influencing scientific inquiry, hypotheses, and popular opinion.
This is why I preach about good information hygiene. We cannot count on a headshot to predatory journals and scientific miscreants to end science’s zombie apocalypse. There is no foolproof test that can save you from believing junk science. Just good old-fashioned critical thinking and self-awareness. I don’t know the answer to this problem. Thankfully, the good people at Retraction Watch are dogged in their work, and we all benefit from that. For my own story, I would settle for an updated COI section and some sort of disclaimer announcing that the paper is currently under investigation. I’ve only been on this journey for nine months, so I’m settling in for the long haul.
Katie Suleta is a regional director of research in graduate medical education. Her background is in public health, health informatics, and infectious diseases.
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Department of Education's push to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) from K-12 schools. Raise your hand if you're shocked.
US District Court Judge Landya McCafferty, an Obama appointee who last year blocked a law in New Hampshire that would have kept transgender biological men out of women's sports in public schools, sided with the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in their lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the effort, arguing that the directive violated teachers' due process and First Amendment rights.
In her order, McCafferty said that the Trump administration's argument is "unconstitutionally vague."
"The letter does not even define what a 'DEI program' is," she wrote.
The Trump administration has until Thursday to comply with her directive, including a prohibition on enforcing use of its "End DEI Portal" and a certification requirement it had imposed, Axios reports.
In January, Trump ordered the end of DEI in public schools and federal contractors in an executive order.
On April 3, the Department of Education sent letters to K-12 agencies ordering them to comply with the administration's anti-DEI policies, a move which followed a February warning that they may lose federal funding for schools that refuse to get rid of DEI.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/obama-judge-blocks-trump-dei-ban-k-12-schools
AstraZeneca has started work with tech companies Tempus and Pathos AI on a project that aims to generate a wide-ranging and comprehensive generative artificial intelligence model for oncology.
The three partners are hoping to come up with a multimodal foundation model – trained on massive datasets spanning everything from text and omics data to medical imaging – that will help researchers look for biological and clinical patterns in cancer, find new drug targets, and develop new treatments.
At the heart of the project is a massive database operated by Tempus that includes more than 7.3 million de-identified patient records – including 1.4 million with imaging data, 1.3 million with genomic information, and 260,000 with full transcriptomics profiles - and over 1.1 billion pages of accompanying clinical text.
Shares in the Chicago-based company, which stands to receive up to $200 million under the terms of the project, shot up nearly 15% after the partnership was announced.
Pathos AI is tasked with using Tempus' platform to build the foundation model which, after it is completed, will be shared by all three companies so they can advance their own individual programmes, according to a joint statement.
Like all big pharma companies, AZ is already starting to deploy generative AI in its R&D operations and has said it is already seeing significant benefits in identifying novel targets, achieving better design of small and large molecules, informing clinical trial design, and improving the efficiency of its regulatory submissions.
"Cancer drug discovery and clinical development are being transformed by the ability to analyse vast amounts of rich data using artificial intelligence," said Jorge Reis-Filho, CAZ's chief AI and data scientist for oncology R&D.
The alliance with Tempus and Pathos AI "will accelerate and increase the probability of clinical success across our diverse pipeline," he added.
Pathos AI starts first clinical trials
Also this week, Pathos AI revealed that it has started patient dosing in a phase 1b/2a clinical trial of pocenbrodib, a CBP/p300 inhibitor that is the lead drug identified using its AI platform. CBP/p300 are proteins that activate genes that promote cancer cell growth and proliferation and represent a novel target in oncology.
The trial is testing the drug in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) as a monotherapy and in combination with other prostate cancer therapies, including hormonal therapy abiraterone acetate, AZ's PARP inhibitor Lynparza (olaparib), and Novartis' radioligand therapy Pluvicto (lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan).
https://pharmaphorum.com/news/astrazeneca-joins-tempus-pathos-cancer-ai-project
Roche has said it is petitioning the Trump administration for an exemption from threatened tariffs for pharmaceuticals, arguing there is no trade imbalance in its US business.
Speaking on the Swiss company's first-quarter media call this morning, Roche chief executive Thomas Schinecker said that – as long as the company produces the same amount of product in the US as it imports – "we should not be impacted by tariffs."
The comments follow Roche's announcement earlier this week that it will invest a colossal $50 billion in US manufacturing and R&D facilities, creating thousands of jobs, over the next five years, responding to a call by Trump for all medicines consumed in the US to be made there.
Schinecker said on the call that, unlike other big pharma groups, it has not relocated its operations to countries like Ireland, but cautioned that for some categories – such as diagnostics, where you "have 10,000 products" – making all of them within a particular country is simply not feasible.
His comments follow a Section 232 national security investigation into the pharma sector by the Trump administration, and repeated comments by the President and other senior figures that tariffs on medicinal products are on the way.
Meanwhile, Schinecker also said that the US spending programme has no bearing on investment projects in Europe and Asia, although Roche was among a group of pharma groups that warned the European Commission recently that manufacturing and R&D could move elsewhere without reform to pharma legislation.
This week, the CEOs of Novartis and Sanofi said in a letter sent to the Financial Times that Europe must start to pay more for medicines as lower prices there create a "clear disincentive for innovators."
The drug industry is still trying to understand the implications of Trump's 'liberation day' tariff announcement on 2nd April, which has caused tumult in global stock and bond markets. Switzerland is currently already facing the threat of a 31% tariff rate but, for now at least, pharma is exempted.
In its update, Roche reported what it said was a good start to the year, with first-quarter sales up 6% to CHF 15.44 billion ($18.73 billion) – slightly above analyst projections – and the pharma division climbing 8% to CHF 11.95 billion. Diagnostics sales were flat at CHF 3.49 billion.
The rise in pharma was driven by breast cancer combination Phesgo (trastuzumab and pertuzumab), Vabysmo (faricimab) for eye diseases, Xolair (omalizumab) in its new food allergy indication, and haemophilia A therapy Hemlibra (emicizumab).
https://pharmaphorum.com/news/roche-seeking-talks-us-tariff-exemptions
