The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, as well as our own Fierce JPM Week, roll into Wednesday with plenty more events, interviews and panels still to come.
Our reporters and editors are on the ground in San Francisco and will keep you updated with all the latest.
Be sure to check back here regularly for JPM Day 3 updates. For a Day 2 recap, check our tracker from yesterday. And for the pharma side of the industry, check out Fierce Pharma’s Day 2 tracker here.
Wednesday, 10:25 a.m. ET
While Novo Nordisk’s work in diabetes and obesity has offered R&D inroads to “adjacencies” like chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, the company will no longer try “to rush in” to new indications, CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar said during his company’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference presentation this week.
Instead, the company will focus on assets tackling diabetes and obesity as a “starting point” and then go from there, the CEO said.
The move, according to Doustdar, is about “taking the company back to the DNA we have.”
“[W]e are really good when we focus,” he added.
Hoping to assuage potential concerns about the slightly scaled-back R&D focus, Doustdar highlighted the significant unmet need that remains in diabetes and obesity. Globally, just 7% of the more than 550 million people living with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes are receiving a GLP-1 drug, and that figure goes down to roughly 2% when accounting for the more than 900 million people around the world with obesity, according to a presentation prepared by Novo for JPM. Story
For more coverage of Novo’s R&D aspirations, check out Fierce’s interview with Chief Scientific Officer Martin Holst Lange, M.D., Ph.D., from the first day of JPM here.
Wednesday, 9:30 a.m. ET
Gilead Sciences Chief Medical Officer Dietmar Berger, M.D., Ph.D., updated Fierce yesterday on the company’s plans for tackling a wider range of viruses—including those that affect the respiratory system or those that could trigger a new pandemic.
Berger spoke to Fierce at an event on the sidelines of JPM, where the CMO also told journalists about the company’s approach to oncology research. Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day also explained how the company is now approaching dealmaking from a “position of strength” as a more mature biopharma. Story
