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Monday, June 9, 2025

Port of Los Angeles sees sharp drop in cargo ships, West Coast dockworkers sit idle

 Shipping activity at major West Coast ports has plummeted, with the Port of Los Angeles averaging just five ships a day — down from a typical dozen — and job orders for dockworkers falling by nearly 50%, according to port officials.

On a typical June day, the Port of Los Angeles would be buzzing with activity — about a dozen ships arriving from Asia, containers being unloaded, and cargo moving quickly across the country.

But lately, things have been eerily quiet.

Shipping activity at major West Coast ports has plummeted, with the Port of Los Angeles averaging just five ships a day — down from a typical dozen.Getty Images

“We’ve averaged about five ships a day,” Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, told Bloomberg News.

“Job orders for our dock workers are down nearly 50%.”

That drop isn’t just a temporary blip. It’s part of a larger slowdown linked to President Donald Trump’s trade war with China — a policy shift that’s been quietly wreaking havoc on West Coast port cities like Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle and Tacoma.

While most of the attention around tariffs has focused on rising prices and stock market swings, the economic damage to these cities has gone under the radar.

These ports depend heavily on trade with Asia, especially China.

And now, because of increased tariffs and uncertainty in US-China relations, the flow of goods has slowed dramatically — with real consequences for jobs, businesses and local economies.

Even a recent truce between the two countries has done little to reverse the trend. Data released Monday by the Chinese government showed that exports to the US tumbled 35% in May compared to the year before — the steepest drop since COVID lockdowns froze trade in early 2020.

A container ship is docked at the Port of Los Angeles. Job orders for dockworkers fell by nearly 50%, according to port officials.Getty Images

That followed a 21% drop in April. While China’s shipments to places like Southeast Asia and Europe are on the rise, they haven’t been enough to balance out the loss in US-bound cargo. All told, China’s overall exports rose just 4.8% last month, well below forecasts.

The effects of the slowdown in Chinese exports are being felt across the Pacific.

Long Beach — along with Los Angeles — operates the biggest port complex in the US. Roughly 60% of its trade is with China.

In 2022 alone, the ports pumped about $300 billion into the Los Angeles County economy and brought in $93 billion in tax revenue.

One in five jobs in the region — from truck drivers to warehouse workers — is tied to the ports. More than 70% of dockworkers live within 10 miles.

But with fewer ships arriving, the impact is spreading. The Port of Oakland saw cargo volumes fall 15% in April. Los Angeles has already had 17 ship cancellations in May, and another 10 were scrapped in June.

New government data also shows a sharp nationwide drop in imports.

Mayor Rex Richardson of Long Beach told Bloomberg News that his city, home to about 450,000 people, is especially vulnerable.

President Trump initiated a trade war with China and other nations after introducing tariffs.REUTERS

He fears that trade-related companies near the port won’t hire as they normally do this summer.

“We need certainty,” Richardson said.

“We need long-range trade policy. We don’t think that is a controversial idea.”

But certainty is in short supply. Trump recently accused China of violating trade agreements and slapped even higher tariffs on steel and aluminum — now up to 50%.

Meanwhile, West Coast leaders like Seroka say their attempts to engage with the federal government have gone nowhere. Despite serving on an advisory panel for the US Trade Representative’s Office, Seroka says his calls to the Trump administration have been ignored.

Instead, he’s been holding regular press conferences to sound the alarm.

On Wednesday, he stood alongside Los Angeles City Council member Tim McOsker, who represents the port district. McOsker didn’t hold back, saying: “This is a mistake for absolutely no reason. There’s no one who can describe why we’re going through this.”

Trump is seen left with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019. Chinese exports have plummeted.REUTERS

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was also critical of the tariffs, saying: “It’s a tax on individuals and their families.”

Seroka warned that the pain won’t stay confined to California.

Since ports are on the front line of the economy, they feel shocks early — before the ripple effects hit stores, factories and households across the country.

“As the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach go,” Seroka said, “so goes the US economy.”

The Post has sought comment from the White House.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/09/business/port-of-los-angeles-seeing-sharp-drop-in-cargo-ships/

IonQ Speeds Quantum-Accelerated Drug Development App With AstraZeneca, AWS, and NVIDIA

 Largest demonstration of its kind combines leading hardware, platforms, and techniques to achieve 20 times speedup over previous demonstrations

Ecosystem collaboration marks significant step toward designing more efficient ways of producing pharmaceuticals

IonQ will showcase demonstration at ISC High Performance conference in Hamburg, Germany

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ionq-speeds-quantum-accelerated-drug-110500527.html

Citius Oncology stock soars on distribution deal

 Shares of Citius Oncology Inc (NASDAQ:CTOR) soared by 33% following the announcement of a distribution services agreement with Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH), a major player in pharmaceutical and specialty pharmaceutical distribution services in the United States. The partnership aims to facilitate the U.S. commercial launch of LYMPHIR™, an FDA-approved immunotherapy for the treatment of relapsed or refractory cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL).

Citius Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:CTXR), the parent company of Citius Oncology, also saw its shares climb by 6.7%.

The distribution agreement is a strategic move for Citius Oncology as it prepares to introduce LYMPHIR™ to the market. Leonard Mazur, Chairman and CEO of Citius Oncology and Citius Pharmaceuticals, expressed confidence in the partnership, stating, "This agreement marks a key step forward in our launch readiness efforts." He emphasized that Cardinal Health’s distribution expertise will ensure efficient and reliable access to LYMPHIR™ for healthcare providers and patients, as the company aims to establish a strong commercial distribution network.

https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/citius-oncology-stock-soars-on-distribution-deal-93CH-4086858

FDA Rejects Axsome New Drug Application (NDA) for AXS-14 for Fibromyalgia

Axsome Therapeutics (NASDAQ: AXSM) received a Refusal to File (RTF) letter from the FDA regarding their New Drug Application for AXS-14 (esreboxetine) for fibromyalgia management. The FDA found the application incomplete, specifically citing issues with the second placebo-controlled trial's 8-week primary endpoint and flexible-dose paradigm. The first trial, using a 12-week endpoint and fixed-dose paradigm, was deemed adequate. Notably, both trials met their primary endpoints, and the FDA didn't question the positive results. In response, Axsome will conduct an additional controlled trial with a fixed-dose paradigm and 12-week primary endpoint, planned to start in Q4 2025. The drug aims to address approximately 17 million U.S. fibromyalgia patients' needs, having shown promising results in improving pain, function, and fatigue symptoms.

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Apple heads into annual showcase reeling from AI missteps, tech upheaval and Trump's trade war

 After stumbling out of the starting gate in Big Tech’s pivotal race to capitalize on artificial intelligence, Apple will try to regain its footing Monday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

The pre-summer rite, which attracts thousands of developers to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters, is expected to be more subdued than the feverish anticipation that surrounded the event during the previous two years.

In 2023, Apple unveiled a mixed-reality headset that has been little more than a niche product, and last year WWDC trumpeted its first major foray into the AI craze with an array of new features highlighted by the promise of a smarter and more versatile version of its virtual assistant, Siri.

But heading into this year’s showcase, Apple faces nagging questions about whether the nearly 50-year-old company has lost some of the mystique and innovative drive that turned it into a tech trendsetter. Instead of making a big splash as it did with the Vision Pro headset, Apple this year is expected to focus on an overhaul of its software that may include a new, more tactile look for the iPhone’s native apps and a new nomenclature for identifying its operating system updates.

Even though it might look like Apple is becoming a technological laggard, Forrester Research analyst Thomas Husson contends the company still has ample time to catch up in an AI race that’s “more of a marathon, than a sprint. It will force Apple to evolve its operating systems.”

If reports about its iOS naming scheme pan out, Apple will switch to a method that automakers have used to telegraph their latest car models by linking them to the year after they first arrive at dealerships. That would mean the next version of the iPhone operating system due out this autumn will be known as iOS 26 instead of iOS 19 — as it would be under the current sequential naming approach.

Whatever it’s named, the next iOS will likely be released as a free update in September, around the same time as the next iPhone models if Apple follows its usual road map.

Meanwhile, Apple’s references to AI may be less frequent than last year when the technology was the main attraction.

While some of the new AI tricks compatible with the latest iPhones began rolling out late last year as part of free software updates, Apple still hasn’t been able to soup up Siri in the ways that it touted at last year’s conference. The delays became so glaring that a chastened Apple retreated from promoting Siri in its AI marketing campaigns earlier this year.

“It’s just taking a bit longer than we thought,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts last month when asked about the company’s headaches with Siri. “But we are making progress, and we’re extremely excited to get the more personal Siri features out there.”

While Apple has been struggling to make AI that meets its standards, the gap separating it from other tech powerhouses is widening. Google keeps packing more AI into its Pixel smartphone lineup while introducing more of the technology into its search engine to dramatically change the way it works. Samsung, Apple’s biggest smartphone rival, is also leaning heavily into AI. Meanwhile, ChatGPT recently struck a deal that will bring former Apple design guru Jony Ive into the fold to work on a new device expected to compete against the iPhone.

“While much of WWDC will be about what the next great thing is for the iPhone, the unspoken question is: What’s the next great thing after the iPhone?” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, another analyst for Forrester Research.

Besides facing innovation challenges, Apple also faces regulatory threats that could siphon away billions of dollars in revenue that help finance its research and development. A federal judge is currently weighing whether proposed countermeasures to Google’s illegal monopoly in search should include a ban on long-running deals worth $20 billion annually to Apple while another federal judge recently banned the company from collecting commission on in-app transactions processed outside its once-exclusive payment system.

On top of all that, Apple has been caught in the cross-hairs of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, a key manufacturing hub for the Cupertino, California, company. Cook successfully persuaded Trump to exempt the iPhone from tariffs during the president’s first administration, but he has had less success during Trump’s second term, which seems more determined to prod Apple to make its products in the U.S..

“The trade war and uncertainty linked to the tariff policy is of much more concern today for Apple’s business than the perception that Apple is lagging behind on AI innovation,” Husson said.

The multi-dimensional gauntlet facing Apple is spooking investors, causing the company’s stock price to plunge by nearly 20% so far this year — a decline that has erased $750 billion in shareholder wealth. After beginning the year as the most valuable company in the world, Apple now ranks third behind long-time rival Microsoft, another AI leader, and AI chipmaker Nvidia.

https://apnews.com/article/apple-conference-iphone-artificial-intelligence-ba918c2091e0d49a8b3f164e4f980b6e

Hong Kong's leader says to maintain US dollar peg, despite geopolitical tensions

 Hong Kong will maintain its currency’s peg to the US dollar, the city’s leader has said, identifying it as a key success factor and rejecting calls to abandon the link amid escalating geopolitical tensions.

But this did not mean the city was solely reliant on the peg for its financial system, and Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu pledged to strengthen Hong Kong’s dominant role as a global offshore renminbi business centre, promising more product diversification.

Lee’s reassurance came after multiple interventions by the city’s de facto central bank recently to defend the peg as the Hong Kong dollar hit the higher end of its trading band, triggered by equity investment activities and the appreciation of regional currencies against the US dollar.

siRNA on the Precipice as Candidates Reach Beyond the Liver

 

As multiple companies vie to expand on Alnylam’s success in commercializing RNAi therapeutics, the pioneering company has set a goal of targeting small interfering RNA to any organ by 2030.

In March, Alnylam chalked up two FDA approvals, for Amvuttra in transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis and, with Sanofi, Qfitlia in hemophilia A and B. Such approvals have become par for the course for Alnylam, leading multiple other companies—including GSKAbbVieBoehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly—to follow suit in pursuing therapies based on small interfering RNA (siRNA). And it’s not just the number of companies involved that’s expanding: while all siRNA therapies approved so far target the liver, Alnylam and others are now seeing some success in targeting other organs as well.

The past two years have seen billions of dollars change hands in a bid to be part of this rapidly growing field. In January 2024, for example, Boehringer Ingelheim announced an agreement potentially worth more than $2 billion with Chinese biotech Suzhou Ribo Life Science and its Swedish unit Ribocure Pharmaceuticals to develop siRNA-based treatments for nonalcoholic or metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), a disease expected to afflict 27 million Americans by 2030. And just last month, GSK plunked down $1.2 billion for Boston Pharmaceuticals’ investigational FGF21 analog efimosfermin alfa, also targeting MASH.

“I think the siRNA space, for rare disease predominantly, has been revolutionary in a handful of cases,” said Myles Minter, a senior biotech analyst at William Blair. “And I do think that the large promise of the field to go into broader, more prevalent indications and to get more approvals is largely ahead of us.”

A Genetic On/Off Switch

The term RNA interference dates back to a 1998 paper by Craig Mello and colleagues, who found that double-stranded RNA was more effective than single strands in silencing genes with corresponding sequences in C. elegans. The mechanism turned out to also work in mammalian cells, and in 2002, multiple researchers who’d led key studies of the phenomenon, including Mello, teamed up with investors to found Alnylam. It took 16 years to gain FDA approval for the first siRNA drug, Onpattro, for polyneuropathy of hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis, a rare genetic disorder caused by mutations in the transthyretin (TTR) gene.

One challenge Alnylam faced in the intervening years was in designing siRNAs that could escape degradation within the body for long enough to be effective, explained Vasant Jadhav, the company’s chief technology officer. But the biggest hurdle—one not unique to siRNAs—was getting the nucleic acid payloads where they needed to go. Then, in 2014, Alnylam researchers and their academic colleagues reported that linking siRNAs with a ligand called GalNAc would get them into cells in the liver, but not into other organs.

Onpattro, approved in 2018, is a GalNac-linked siRNA. The drug “was pretty revolutionary at the time,” Minter said, because rather than simply treating symptoms or even slowing the toll of polyneuropathy of hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis, it elicited functional improvement.

“The way I like to think about siRNA is that it’s a way that you can titrate, so you can dose at a genetic level. And it’s really one of the only modalities that you can do that with,” Minter told BioSpace.

Other therapies followed from Alnylam for hypercholesterolemia (Leqvio, developed and commercialized by Novartis), acute hepatic porphyria (Givlaari) and primary hyperoxaluria type 1 (Oxlumo). Apart from Alnylam and its partners Sanofi and Novartis, the only other company to get an siRNA drug onto the market so far is Novo Nordisk, whose Rivfloza (nedosiran), approved by the FDA in 2023, treats the rare genetic disease primary hyperoxaluria type 1 (PH1).

Testing the Limits

So far, all of these therapies have targeted processes in the liver—including Amvuttra, which takes aim at cardiac outcomes via knocking down transthyretin (TTR) in hepatic cells. But experts who spoke with BioSpace said that could soon change. “Where we’re starting to see innovation—and it still is early stage, although it looks very promising—is trying to deliver to new tissues,” Minter said. That targeting problem is “the major question in the field that we’re working on right now.”

Andrew Adams, Eli Lilly’s group vice president, molecule discovery and director of the Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicines, echoed this. GalNAc has thus far been a “unicorn” in the field in terms of its specific and safe delivery, and “we have a lot of work to do to open up si[RNA]beyond the hepatocyte, but . . . probably once we crack it is going to be similar to when Alnylam and others initially cracked GalNAc, and you’ll just sort of walk your way down the list of indications in the new tissue that you open up,” he told BioSpace.

“I think probably the most interesting space for the field right now is in delivery to the brain and going after diseases of the brain,” he said, citing Alnylam’s candidate mivelsiran, currently in Phase II for cerebral amyloid angiopathy and Phase I for Alzheimer’s disease. Lilly, too, is pursuing neurodegenerative targets with siRNA, Adams added. Other tissues with promising early data include adipose and lung.

In a March conference presentation, for example, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals released mouse data on two siRNA candidates devised to reduce body fat while preserving lean muscle mass. One targets hepatic cells’ expression of a gene, INHBE, that is involved in metabolic processes, while the other silences expression of ALK7, a gene needed for fat storage, in lipocytes. Early clinical studies on both candidates have begun.

And last spring, Arrowhead announced interim results of a Phase I/II study of ARO-RAGE, an siRNA that targets lung tissue and silences the receptor for advanced glycation end-products, a mediator of type 2 inflammation. In study participants with asthma, two doses of the candidate reduced serum levels of the target protein by up to 88%, the company reported.

siRNA’s limitations don’t end at targeting. It can’t be used to completely knock out expression of a gene, only knock it down, and it can’t by itself be used against multiple genetic targets, Jadhav noted.

In addition, RNAi can only dial gene expression down, so it can’t be used to directly boost levels of a deficient protein. Researchers have found workarounds for this in some cases, though. Jadhav cited the example of Givlaari, which treats acute hepatic porphyria. “In this metabolic pathway, the heme biosynthesis, one of the enzymes is mutated, and because of that, you have toxic intermediates that build up,” he said. Since siRNA can’t replace the mutated enzyme, the therapy instead targets a different enzyme, GO, that’s upstream of the toxic intermediates, lowering their levels.

siRNA’s successes could pave the way for a more permanent treatment option, Adams said. “Once you’ve generated enough evidence over a long enough period of time in enough patients that getting rid of this protein [via siRNA] has no negative consequences in an adult . . . Probably at that point you start to feel confident to permanently change something, but I think the bar should be and is high for things that people will tolerate permanent genetic changes for,” he said. He raised the example of Leqvio, which targets the enzyme PCSK9 in order to lower cholesterol levels. Verve Therapeutics now has a gene editor targeting the same enzyme in early clinical trials.

Jadhav allowed that gene editing could become a competitor to siRNA in some cases. “I think at the end of the day, any solution . . . biopharma brings for the patients would be great,” he said. “At the same time, we feel that with RNAi, we can achieve [a] durable level of activity and still be reversible. You kind of get the best of both things. So we remain very confident and very optimistic about the future of RNAi.”

Looking ahead, Minter summarized what he sees as the prospects for siRNA: “we’re at the precipice where we’re waiting, but it’s an exciting five to ten years ahead for the field, no doubt.”

https://www.biospace.com/drug-development/sirna-on-the-precipice-as-candidates-reach-beyond-the-liver