French month-ahead power prices rose after Electricite de France SA warned that nuclear output could be cut at the end of June because of scorching weather, just as increased cooling demand strains electricity supply.
Several plants along the Garonne and Rhone rivers could be impacted as rising water temperatures threaten cooling operations, according to the state-run utility. Production may be restricted at the Blayais site from June 30, St. Alban from July 1, and Golfech from July 2.
The European Union has vowed to retaliate if the US sticks with its baseline 10% tariffs, according to a report in Bloomberg News on Wednesday. The EU said that it would hit US goods like Boeing (BA) planes with tariffs if President Trump follows through with baseline levies on European exports.
Until now, the European Commission had not indicated if Trump's baseline tariff would trigger retaliation.
“We will need to retaliate and rebalance in some key sectors if the US insists on an asymmetrical deal,” the EU’s industry chief, Stephane Sejourne, told Bloomberg News, including if the “outcome of the negotiations is that a 10% tariff remains.”
Meanwhile, the pressure is now on. From Canada to Japan, key trade deals are struggling to get over the finish line with just two weeks to go before Trump's tariff deadline.
Trump managed to firmed up a trade deal with the United Kingdom last week, and its European Union neighbors are apparently pushing for a similarly styled deal despite fits and starts in talks.Trump has threatened tariffs of up to 50% on EU imports after various tariff "pauses" lapse July 9.
Starting Monday, Trump's tariffs will affect washing machines, fridges and ovens. This could mean higher prices for everyday items in the US.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney's government threatened to hike tariffs by late July on US imports of steel and aluminum, weeks after Trump ballooned US levies on those metals to 50%. At the G7 this week, Trump and Carney both expressed optimism on a trade deal between the countries.
The furious push follows Trump's recent warning that he would soon send letters setting unilateral tariff rates, raising questions about the status of negotiations and a return to his "Liberation Day" tariffs that roiled markets. Trump instituted a pause on his most punishing duties that expires July 9.
Trump scored a legal win on Friday, as the Supreme Court decline to expedite a challenge from two family-owned businesses, including toy maker Learning Resources.
The case is one of several legal challenges working its way through the court system.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recognized Eli Lilly and Co (NYSE:LLY) with a significant milestone by awarding orphan drug status to its promising new treatment, olomorasib. This designation is specifically for its potential in treating KRAS G12C-mutant non-small cell lung cancer, a form of cancer that has been challenging to manage. Currently, olomorasib is advancing through phase 3 clinical trials, where it is being evaluated for efficacy in combination with Keytruda and chemotherapy as a first-line therapy for patients with advanced cases.
Best Buy Co.’s health arm is offloading the Current Health business that it bought in 2021 for $400 million.
Current Health, an at-home care technology company, was one of several acquisitions Best Buy Health made as it consolidated smaller operations in the space to build its home-care segment. It still owns the Lively and PERS+ businesses.
Sanofi has licensed gusacitinib, an oral JAK/SYK dual inhibitor from the “AI-native” drug development company Formation Bio, marking the pharma’s latest investment in AI-focused drug development.
Terms of the deal, announced Monday, were sparse. The licensing agreement will involve upfront and milestone payments worth up to €545 million, or approximately $632 million, though the companies did not provide a specific breakdown of these numbers. Formation’s subsidiary, Libertas Bio, which is in charge of the drug’s development, will also be eligible for sales royalties in the low-to-mid-teen range.
The asset at the heart of the deal, gusacitinib, is an investigational small-molecule drug that blocks the JAK and SYK proteins, both of which are involved in immune and inflammatory signaling cascades. Formation itself acquired gusacitinib from Asana BioSciences in November 2022—and formed Libertas to take charge of its development—and has since taken the asset to Phase III studies for chronic hand eczema.
According to Monday’s announcement, however, Sanofi will chart a new path for gusacitinib and “explore its potential in a new indication not previously studied,” for which the pharma will run a Phase I trial. The companies did not reveal what this new indication is.
Sanofi and Formation are long-time partners. In October 2022, the French pharma signed a three-year contract with Formation—named TrialSpark at the time—to leverage the biotech’s “tech-enabled drug development capabilities” to advance novel therapies in “areas of high unmet patient needs,” though the companies did not reveal which indications they specifically planned to target.
Then, in May last year, Sanofi and Formation together teamed up with OpenAI to develop “AI-powered software.” In that partnership, Sanofi is providing its collaborators with access to its proprietary data, while Formation contributes engineering resources. OpenAI brings its AI capabilities to the table.
Again, the companies at the time did not give much detail: They did not provide the financial terms of the deal, nor did they reveal priority disease areas.
In recent years, Sanofi has been investing heavily in its AI capabilities. In 2022, for instance, the pharma opened an AI Center of Excellence in Toronto to “identify, develop and scale innovative solutions,” as per a press announcement at the time. A few months later, the company signed a research collaboration with the BioMed X Institute in Germany to develop a computational platform that can predict the efficacy of drug candidates.
More recently, in April of this year, Sanofi put more than $1.8 billion on the line, including a $125 million upfront commitment, in an AI-focused partnership with biologics specialist Earendil Labs. The companies will focus on advancing two bispecific antibodies for immunology indications.
TIGIT was once the hottest target in immuno-oncology. Just a few years later, the pipeline has thinned significantly as a who’s who of drugmakers have retreated from the mechanism in response to lackluster clinical data. Some R&D programs are ongoing, but the rapid retreat means the industry has already burnt billions of dollars on deals and development for failed candidates.
Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead, GSK and Novartis paid $1.4 billion upfront between them to join Merck and Roche in the TIGIT race. The figure excludes the $175 million Gilead paid to enter into a multi-asset deal that gave it the right to license candidates including Arcus Biosciences’ domvanalimab, but includes the $275 million the big biotech handed over when it took up its option on the anti-TIGIT antibody.
The deals collectively included more than $5 billion in milestones. However, the overwhelming majority of them were unpaid when BMS, GSK and Novartis dropped their TIGIT programs. Gilead is still developing its asset and could owe Arcus up to $500 million in milestones tied to approvals in the U.S.
Even without the regulatory milestones, Gilead has bet more on TIGIT than some of its peers. The outlay includes $740 million in equity investments in Arcus. Gilead paid an average of $27.58 per share across the three purchases. Arcus currently trades below $10. The fate of domvanalimab will go a long way in determining what return, if any, Gilead gets on its investment in Arcus.
TIGIT development costs are embedded in the vast R&D budgets of the biopharma companies advancing the candidates. Roche’s broad tiragolumab development program accounted for some of the almost $15 billion the Swiss drugmaker spent on R&D last year, but publicly available figures lack details of the company’s spending on TIGIT. Similarly opaque accounts obscure TIGIT spending at other companies.
Programs partnered with smaller biotechs shed some light on TIGIT development costs. GSK and iTeos Therapeutics agreed to spend $900 million on the global development plan for their TIGIT drug. The asset’s failure in Phase II means GSK and iTeos likely only spent a fraction of that amount, but the figure provides a ballpark estimate of what companies with large late-phase programs may have invested.
Roche has tested tiragolumab in 10 Phase III studies with a collective enrollment target of almost 4,600 patients. Merck’s Phase III vibostolimab program spanned five studies with a collective enrollment target of more than 4,600 patients. Gilead, Arcus and AstraZeneca, which is partnered on a domvanalimab trial, have sponsored three Phase III studies that are enrolling almost 3,000 patients among them.
If GSK and iTeos’ spending plan is indicative of R&D costs at other companies, Gilead, Merck and Roche may have spent billions of dollars between them taking their TIGIT assets through mid- and late-phase trials.
Gilead’s relationship with Arcus provides another datapoint. Arcus received between $161 million and $165 million from its collaboration partners as reimbursement for R&D costs in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Mechanisms other than TIGIT will account for some of the spending. Equally, the figures do not capture spending on Gilead-led activities, which Arcus said increased in 2024.
ITeos’ accounts provide another glimpse at the cost of TIGIT development. As of the end of March, the biotech had raised more than $1.1 billion across public and private financing rounds and its deal with GSK. ITeos, which is closing down over its TIGIT flop, had $624 million in cash and investments. The difference between the amount iTeos had raised and the amount it was holding was more than $500 million.
Spending on TIGIT adds to the mountain of money that drug developers have plowed into an alphabet soup of targets that at one time were seen as the next big thing in cancer immunotherapy. IL-2 attracted interest in 2018 and 2019, when BMS paid Nektar Therapeutics $1.85 billion to co-develop a molecule and Sanofi acquired Synthorx for $2.5 billion. Both programs ended in failure.
Other companies placed bets on CD47. Gilead acquired Forty Seven for $4.9 billion in 2020 and Pfizer snapped up Trillium Therapeutics for $2.3 billion the following year. Pfizer continues to list maplirpacept, a CD47 candidate acquired in the Trillium takeover, in its pipeline, but Gilead’s travails have dampened expectations. Gilead gave up on Forty Seven’s magrolimab last year after a series of setbacks.
TIM-3, 4-1BB, ICOS, OX40 and CD73 are among the other targets that have attracted heavy investment, including triple-digit upfront licensing fees, over the years. Active clinical development is continuing in some areas but the targets are yet to live up to the early excitement, such as the report that 4-1BB drug candidates were driving “pretty phenomenal responses” in cancer patients.
Work on LAG-3 delivered an approved drug, BMS’ Opdualag, but sales have been fairly modest by the standards of leading immuno-oncology products. Opdualag, a fixed-dose combination of PD-1 and LAG-3 blockers, generated sales of $928 million last year. BMS is on course to reach the blockbuster threshold this year, with sales in the first quarter coming in at $252 million.
As excitement about TIGIT and the other targets has faded, PD-1/L1xVEGF-A bispecifics have emerged as the industry’s next big hope. With China’s Akeso validating the mechanism, albeit without allaying concerns about overall survival and efficacy in global trials, leading biopharma companies have moved swiftly to secure riders in immuno-oncology’s new hottest race.
In the nine months since Akeso’s ivonescimab beat Keytruda, BioNTech, BMS, Merck and Pfizer have paid more than $4 billion upfront among them for rights to PD-1/L1xVEGF-A bispecifics. The outlay will rise by at least $2 billion as BMS makes noncontingent payments and could top $20 billion if the deals hit their milestones. The fallout from failure would make the TIGIT turmoil look like a tempest in a teapot.
The artificial intelligence start-up that recently clinched a $14 billion investment from Meta has an “incredibly janky” security system – using public Google Doc files to store confidential information on clients like Meta, Google and xAI, according to a report.
It was reported earlier this month that Meta agreed to take a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.8 billion and bring the startup’s CEO Alexandr Wang over to lead a new “superintelligence” lab.
That shockingly steep price tag indicates that Meta believes Wang and his company are key to bringing the social media firm’s AI division to the next level.
But the company has been strangely relaxed when it comes to its work with high-profile clients, leaving top-secret projects and sensitive information like email addresses and pay details in Google Docs accessible to anyone with a link, according to Business Insider.
“We are conducting a thorough investigation and have disabled any user’s ability to publicly share documents from Scale-managed systems,” a Scale AI spokesperson told The Post.
“We remain committed to robust technical and policy safeguards to protect confidential information and are always working to strengthen our practices.”
While there is no indication the public files have led to a breach, they could leave the company susceptible to hacks, according to cybersecurity experts.
Google and xAI did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment. Meta declined to comment.
Five current and former Scale AI contractors told BI that the use of Google Docs was widespread across the company.
“The whole Google Docs system always seemed incredibly janky,” one worker said.
BI said it was able to view thousands of pages of project documents across 85 Google Docs detailing Scale AI’s sensitive work with Big Tech clients, like how Google used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to fine-tune its own chatbot.
At least seven Google manuals marked “confidential” including recommendations to improve the chatbot, then-called Bard, were left accessible to the public, according to the report.
Public Google Doc files included details on Elon Musk’s “Project Xylophone,” like training documents with 700 conversation prompts to improve an AI chatbot’s conversation skills, the report said.
So-called “confidential” Meta training documents with audio clips of “good” and “bad” speech prompts to train its AI products were also left public.
While these secret projects were often given codenames, several Scale AI contractors said it was still easy to figure out which client they were working for.
Some documents tied to codenamed projects even mistakenly included the company’s logo, like a presentation that included a Google logo, according to BI.
When working with AI products, sometimes the chatbot would simply reveal the client when asked, the contractors said.
There were also publicly available Google Doc spreadsheets that listed the names and private email addresses of thousands of workers, the news outlet found.
One spreadsheet was frankly titled “Good and Bad Folks” and labelled dozens of workers as either “high quality” or “cheating,” BI said. Another document flagged workers with “suspicious behavior.”
Still more public documents laid out how much individual contractors were paid, and included detailed notes on pay disputes and discrepancies, according to the report.
