China's First ASCO Plenary, a Standing Ovation for Daraxonrasib, and Washington's Counter-Move – This Week in Biotech #103
Akeso's ivonescimab beats a PD-1 inhibitor head-to-head in lung cancer, Revolution Medicines doubles survival in pancreatic cancer, and a House bill targets US investment in Chinese biotech (5/29–6/4)
Welcome back to This Week in Biotech by Biotech Blueprint, edition 103, covering biotech and pharma news from May 29 to June 4, 2026.
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VIDEO SUMMARY
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS 🔑
ASCO 2026 was the meeting where Chinese oncology stopped being a sourcing story and became a science story. For the first time in the society’s 61 year history, a drug that originated in China took the plenary stage. Akeso’s ivonescimab, a bispecific antibody that targets both PD-1 and VEGF simultaneously, beat an active PD-1 inhibitor head to head in first line squamous lung cancer and cut the risk of death by 34%. The comparator wasn’t placebo or chemotherapy. It was an approved checkpoint inhibitor, which makes this a Chinese asset setting a new global standard, published in The Lancet the same day. Behind it came two more positive China-run Phase 3 oncology readouts the same week: Bristol Myers Squibb’s bispecific antibody-drug conjugate cutting progression risk by 71% in triple-negative breast cancer, and Innovent’s claudin-targeted conjugate hitting its endpoint in gastric cancer. The center of gravity in oncology drug origination has visibly shifted east.
Washington noticed. Days after ASCO ended, a bipartisan House bill moved to fold biotechnology into the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security Act, which would subject US investment in Chinese biotech to national security review. The bill follows the Pfizer-Metsera and BMS-Hengrui deals from the past two months, and the framing is that Chinese drug development progress is now a security exposure. If it passes, it would put friction on exactly the licensing channel that Lilly, Merck, AstraZeneca, and BMS have been using to buy discovery speed at a discount. The cheapest, fastest moving early stage oncology data in the world is increasingly Chinese, and the US is now trying to restrict the capital that brings it onshore. Any large cap company actively negotiating a China asset deal just picked up a new timing risk.
Revolution Medicines was the Western story of the week. Daraxonrasib confirmed a doubling of overall survival in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer at the ASCO plenary, 13.2 months versus 6.7 months on chemotherapy, hazard ratio 0.40. Pancreatic cancer is one of the indications that has resisted progress for a generation, and the result drew a standing ovation. The more interesting signal is commercial. Patients and oncologists are already pressing for access to a drug that hasn’t been approved yet, which is something most oncology programs never have to deal with.
Lilly kept buying modality breadth while pushing back on pricing pressure. An RNA exon-editing deal with Ascidian worth up to $1.9B, a Korean GLP-2 obesity asset from Hanmi, a five program option deal with China’s Haisco, an ultimatum to 340B hospitals on discount data sharing, and a billion dollar cut to planned German manufacturing in response to German pricing reform. And in immunology, Abivax posted the best Phase 3 ulcerative colitis efficacy of the cycle and the stock got crushed anyway, because the safety table had cancer cases in it. A reminder that efficacy doesn’t clear the gate on its own when a chronic, non-life-threatening disease meets an oncogenic signal.
BIOTECH/PHARMA NEWS 🧬
🔹 Akeso’s ivonescimab became the first China-originated oncology drug ever selected for the ASCO plenary, with Phase 3 HARMONi-6 data showing it reduced the risk of death by 34% in first line advanced squamous non-small cell lung cancer versus tislelizumab, an active PD-1 inhibitor. Median overall survival hit 27.9 months, a 4.2 month improvement after 21.4 months of follow-up. Ivonescimab is a bispecific antibody that targets PD-1 and VEGF at the same time, and the results were published in The Lancet simultaneously with the presentation. This is the first regimen to show a survival edge over a checkpoint inhibitor in first line squamous disease. The geographic caveat stands. HARMONi-6 enrolled entirely in China, and Summit Therapeutics holds the US and ex-China rights and still needs Western confirmatory trials to convince the FDA. But the mechanism question is settled in a way it wasn’t before. A PD-1/VEGF bispecific can outperform the checkpoint inhibitors that currently define standard of care.
🔹 Bristol Myers Squibb’s izalontamab brengitecan, the EGFR-by-HER3 bispecific antibody-drug conjugate the company paid $800M for in 2023, posted positive Phase 3 data in the China-based PANKU-Breast02 study in previously treated metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The drug cut the risk of progression or death by 71% versus chemotherapy and produced a 51.7% response rate against 20.5% for chemo, hitting both progression-free and overall survival co-primary endpoints. This is the first bispecific antibody-drug conjugate to clear dual primary endpoints in this setting. The competitive read for the marketed TROP2 conjugates, Gilead’s Trodelvy and the recently approved Datroway from AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo, is direct. They now face a dual-target conjugate with a more potent payload landing harder on response rate.
🔹 Representatives John Moolenaar and Debbie Dingell introduced a bipartisan House bill to add biotechnology to the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security Act, which would require national security review of US investment in Chinese biotech. The bill follows the Pfizer-Metsera and Bristol Myers-Hengrui deals from the past two months and frames Chinese drug development progress as a security exposure. The practical effect, if it passes, would be friction on exactly the licensing channel that Lilly, Merck, AstraZeneca, and Bristol Myers Squibb have been using to buy discovery speed at a discount. ASCO proved the science is real. Washington responded by trying to gate the money. Companies mid-negotiation on China assets now carry a regulatory timing risk that didn’t exist a quarter ago.
🔹 Revolution Medicines confirmed the pivotal Phase 3 RASolute 302 result at the ASCO plenary: median overall survival of 13.2 months on oral daraxonrasib versus 6.7 months on chemotherapy in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, a hazard ratio of 0.40 with p less than 0.0001. Progression-free survival was 7.2 months versus 3.6. Daraxonrasib is a multi-selective RAS inhibitor dosed at 300 mg once daily, and the survival doubling in an indication where median survival has barely moved in decades drew a standing ovation from the audience. The more telling signal is commercial. STAT reported that patients and oncologists are already pressing for access to a drug that hasn’t been approved, and analyst conversations have shifted from whether daraxonrasib works to how far the franchise expands into earlier lines and first-line use. That is a quality of problem most oncology programs never reach.
🔹 Lilly had another busy week of M&A on multiple fronts. The headline deal was an RNA exon-editing collaboration with Ascidian Therapeutics worth up to $1.9B for genetic kidney diseases. Lilly also took most rights to Hanmi’s GLP-2 obesity candidate sonefpeglutide, optioned up to five programs from China’s Haisco, and extended its delivery technology pact with Camurus. The GLP-2 mechanism is a new metabolic lever distinct from the GLP-1/GIP axis that defines Zepbound, fitting the pattern of buying adjacency rather than more of the same. At the same time, Lilly issued a data sharing ultimatum to 340B hospitals, demanding proof they are not double dipping discounts or losing access to them, and cut its planned German manufacturing investment by at least $1B in response to German drug pricing reform. Boehringer Ingelheim made a similar cut on the same day. Lilly is spending freely on modality breadth while using its scale to push back hard on any policy that compresses net pricing.
🔹 Alnylam signed a three year AI deal worth up to $2B with Inceptive Nucleics, with $30M upfront in cash and equity, to build RNA foundation models. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the co-authors of the original transformer architecture paper that underpins modern large language models. The aim is to design and prioritize RNAi therapeutics computationally rather than empirically. The deal sits alongside NewLimit’s $435M round for epigenetic reprogramming, with Lilly Ventures participating, as evidence that AI and biology capital is now flowing to incumbents buying compute capability, not just to startups selling it. The small upfront, large milestone ceiling structure treats AI design as a high option, low commitment bet.
🔹 Abivax’s obefazimod, an oral miR-124 enhancer in ulcerative colitis, hit its Phase 3 ABTECT maintenance primary endpoint cleanly. The 25 mg and 50 mg doses produced clinical remission at Week 44 in 50.8% and 51.3% of patients respectively versus 10.4% on placebo, a roughly 40-point placebo-adjusted gap that is among the strongest ever reported in ulcerative colitis, with all key secondary endpoints met. The market sold the stock hard anyway, because the safety table reported cancer cases among treated patients, concentrated at the high dose. This is the immunology evidentiary bar in its purest form: efficacy alone doesn’t clear the gate when a chronic, non-life-threatening disease meets an oncogenic safety question. Abivax, a reported takeover target, plans an FDA filing in Q4 2026, and the label fight will be about dose and malignancy monitoring, not whether the drug works.
🔹 Celcuity presented full Phase 3 VIKTORIA-1 data showing its gedatolisib triplet extended median progression-free survival to 11.1 months versus 5.6 months for alpelisib plus fulvestrant in PIK3CA-mutated, HR-positive/HER2-negative advanced breast cancer, a 50% reduction in progression risk. The doublet matched it at 11.3 months. An investigator called it a potential new standard of care, and gedatolisib, a multi-target inhibitor of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway, clearly beat the existing PI3K inhibitor on the market. The stock fell anyway, because expectations had been set at “transformative” and an 11-month median against an old comparator read as merely good. A useful reminder that in crowded breast cancer, the bar for a clean Phase 3 win is now set by investor narrative as much as by the curve.
🔹 Roche disclosed that giredestrant, its oral selective estrogen receptor degrader, missed in first-line metastatic breast cancer, and is redirecting the program into a new adjuvant Phase 3 rather than abandoning it. The result extends a difficult stretch for the oral SERD class, coming weeks after AstraZeneca’s camizestrant drew a 6-3 ODAC vote against its first-line switch strategy. The pattern is consistent: oral SERDs are struggling to prove first-line benefit against entrenched endocrine backbones, and the survivors are retreating to narrower biomarker-defined or earlier-stage settings where the comparator is weaker.
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