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• If there’s any event that draws a lot of attention to TV ads, it’s the Super Bowl.

• Drug companies usually sit on the sidelines for the annual advertising bonanza, and one might expect this Sunday’s game to be no different, considering the FDA’s recent crackdown on pharma ads. But that’s not the case.

• Novartis and Boehringer Ingelheim have already released their Super Bowl LX ads online, and Novo Nordisk is teasing its big ad on Instagram.

• Telehealth companies Hims & Hers and Ro also bought airtime during the championship game to promote GLP-1 products, among other things.

• Watch the video analysis: STAT

• Eli Lilly surpassed analysts’ expectations for 2025 and fourth-quarter revenues on February 4, and anticipates a large increase in revenue this year. It marks a sharp juxtaposition to its main rival Novo Nordisk, which expects to shrink in 2026.

• Lilly said it pulled in $19.29 billion in the last quarter of 2025, thanks to $11.66 billion from its tirzepatide franchise. Analysts had expected $17.8 billion for the quarter. Full-year 2025 revenues came in at $65.17 billion, well above the $63.9 billion that analysts projected and the $63.5 billion that Lilly predicted in October.

• Novo Nordisk had disappointed the market a day earlier with the news that it expects sales to shrink by 5% to 13% at constant exchange rates in 2026. (Endpoints)

• An experimental rare disease drug from Sanofi succeeded against one lysosomal storage disorder but failed against another, the French pharmaceutical company said.

• According to Sanofi, the drug, dubbed venglustat, missed its primary objective in a phase 3 study testing it against Fabry disease.

• However, in another study in a form of Gaucher disease, the drug met its main goal and three out of four key secondary endpoints.

• Sanofi didn’t provide details—they’ll be shared at medical meeting this week—but said it intends to submit the Gaucher results to global regulatory authorities. (BioPharma Dive)

• In a February 3 letter, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) took issue with the lack of transparency in the agency's handling of the program and questioned its legal underpinnings, noting that Congress did not sign off on the plan.

“The public must have transparency about the ‘voucher’ program, under which drug approvals have been made almost wholly and in an unprecedented manner by the FDA’s political leadership,” states Auchincloss, who is a member of a House subcommittee on health.

• The forms, which are collected annually by the Office of Government Ethics, list investments, outside income, and other financial details for senior government officials and their spouses.

• Such disclosures are considered critical to avoiding potential conflicts of interest at the FDA, where staffers are often involved in regulating multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies.

• Auchincloss questions whether the FDA had the legal authority to establish the voucher program without action from Congress, which typically legislates such programs into law.

  • Several senior FDA staffers have declined to sign off on drug approvals going through the program due to legal concerns, as previously reported by the AP. (MedPage Today)

China is “really very close to us. If they continue like that with that strength, they will become better than us. I think it’s a wake-up call for us,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC earlier this month at Davos.

• He added that, in order to compete, the U.S. needs to adequately fund Ph.D. programs, the NIH, and other research.

• The company also announced it was investing $15 billion in manufacturing and R&D in China.

• So far in 2026, it appears the four-year biotech slump is coming to an end, and investors seem optimistic about the near-term future.

• A key question is whether a year’s worth of upheaval at the FDA will blunt biotech's momentum in the US. If it does, one of the major concerns is that America will be left playing catch-up.

• Drug companies aren’t just buying up Chinese drug candidates; they’re also expanding their footprints in the country.

• Global life sciences companies have clustered in hubs like Shanghai's “Pharma Valley,” which is home to more than 1,700 companies.

• As part of an effort, called the Undiagnosed Hackathon, to crack 29 undiagnosed conditions, researchers deployed AlphaGenome — an AI model developed by Google DeepMind.

• AlphaGenome was made available to scientists last year and can predict the diverse effects of mutations in non-coding DNA sequences, including how they might affect the activity of nearby genes.

• Mutations in these sequences are especially vexing to researchers seeking to uncover the genetic basis for rare, often fatal diseases.

“These are variants that, to be quite honest, often get triaged,” says Eric Klee, a bioinformatician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who co-led the Undiagnosed Hackathon in September last year.

• To see whether AlphaGenome could help to interpret the effects non-coding variants, Klee tested its prediction for a variant that he and his colleagues had linked to an individual’s diagnosis before the September 2025 hackathon.

• Experimental work showed that the mutation altered gene expression in cardiac cells, but not in neural cells, which was in line with the symptoms the individual experienced.

• AlphaGenome’s predictions of the variant’s effects supported this conclusion, Klee says. (Nature)