One of medicine’s costliest treatment areas could become even more pricey as Biogen seeks to layer the company’s $750,000 spinal muscular atrophy drug on top of the $2.1 million-per-patient Novartis gene therapy Zolgensma.

Sanofi is rumored to have a $50 billion budget for mergers and acquisitions and is taking a look at U.S.-based biotech companies, including South San Francisco-based Principia Biopharma.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to Becton Dickinson for a COVID-19 antigen test that can be administered at the point of care and produce results within 15 minutes.

South San Francisco-based Akero Therapeutics presented results from a 16-week analysis of secondary and exploratory endpoints in the company’s Phase IIa BALANCED clinical trial of efruxifermin in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

Britain’s AstraZeneca approached U.S. rival Gilead Sciences about a possible merger to form one the world’s largest drug companies, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AstraZeneca and Merck’s Lynparza (olaparib) in combination with Roche’s Avastin (bevacizumab) for the maintenance treatment of adults with advanced epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube or primary peritoneal cancer who are in complete or partial response to first-line platinum-based chemotherapy and whose cancer has been tested to have either a deleterious or suspected deleterious BRCA mutation and/or genomic instability.

The U.S. economy lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, the steepest plunge in payrolls since the Great Depression and the starkest sign yet of how the novel coronavirus pandemic is battering the world’s biggest economy.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared expanded use of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s Zejula as a first option to keep advanced ovarian cancer at bay in women who have responded to chemotherapy.

Roche company Genentech presented one-year data from FIREFISH Part 2, a pivotal trial of risdiplam in infants one to seven months old with symptomatic Type 1 spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).

During the fight against COVID-19, the message from venture capital investors to biotechnology companies is mixed.