TrumpRx Price Claims Get Fact-Checked, RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Overhaul Paused, Lilly’s Retatrutide Hits Phase 3 – This Week in Biotech #92
A judge freezes ACIP changes, J&J wins a plaque psoriasis pill approval, and Lilly raises the bar again in obesity and diabetes (Mar 13-19, 2026).
Welcome back to This Week in Biotech by Biotech Blueprint, edition 92, covering biotech and biopharma news from March 13th to 19th, 2026.
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VIDEO SUMMARY
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS 🔑
Let’s start with TrumpRx. Right now it does not actually guarantee the world’s lowest prices, but it basically discounts for a specific slice of people, mainly cash-pay patients, and only on a limited list of drugs. The NY Times ran a price check and a lot of branded drugs still come out cheaper overseas. That is not because those countries have better coupon codes, but because they negotiate harder and then spread costs through the system.
On the policy front, the RFK Jr. vaccine overhaul hit a legal wall. A federal judge in Massachusetts paused the January memo that reduced routine childhood schedule and also froze the new ACIP appointments and everything they voted on. The practical implication is that vaccine guidance is now in limbo again, but this at least puts a temporary brake on more abrupt changes while the legal process plays out.
Clinically and commercially, there were two very different kinds of “big wins.” J&J’s oral Icotyde got its FDA approval in moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. And it does not need to beat AbbVie’s Skyrizi on peak efficacy to matter. If a once daily pill pulls even a modest chunk of patients off endless topical cycling, it expands the treated market and changes what first-line can look like in the real world. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly put up another serious set of numbers with retatrutide in type 2 diabetes. Strong A1C drops, unusually large weight loss for this population plus low discontinuation rates. You do not have to crown it the “best” today to see the strategic problem for everyone else - Lilly just keeps showing up with another credible next thing.
Finally, Aldeyra’s dry eye program got a Complete Response Letter again, and this time the FDA basically said the efficacy story is not consistent enough to trust. No safety or manufacturing issues, just the hardest kind of rejection to spin because it goes straight at the signal.
BIOTECH/PHARMA NEWS 🧬
🔹 TrumpRx is running into a reality check: a discount website is not the same thing as “the lowest prices in the world.” A new New York Times investigation (with German outlets) compared TrumpRx prices to what patients in Germany and other wealthy countries effectively pay and found many branded, on-patent drugs are still cheaper abroad, sometimes dramatically, because those systems negotiate harder and then spread the cost through insurance. TrumpRx can still be a real help for a narrow group (people paying cash, for a limited list of roughly a few dozen drugs), but it is not a systemic price reset, and it does not touch the biggest driver of U.S. drug spending: what insurers and government programs pay for high-cost specialty meds. The bigger takeaway for biotech is that Most favored nation pricing as a slogan is easy, but turning it into broad, durable savings without shifting costs somewhere else is the hard part.
🔹 J&J just picked up an important plaque psoriasis approval. The FDA cleared Icotyde (icotrokinra), a once daily interleukin-23 receptor antagonist, for moderate-to-severe disease in adults and adolescents 12+ who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy. The pivotal ICONIC phase 3 program (about 2,500 patients) hit primary endpoints with a favorable safety profile, and the Street is already framing this as the first serious “oral first line” threat to injectable incumbents like AbbVie’s Skyrizi, not necessarily because it beats Skyrizi on raw efficacy, but because an effective oral option can pull more patients off endless topical cycling and expand the treated market. For Protagonist it means a $50M approval milestone now, 6% to 10% royalties, and up to $580M more in future milestones.
🔹 Aldeyra got hit with a Complete Response Letter for reproxalap in dry eye disease, and the FDA’s message was basically “the efficacy story is not consistent enough to approve.” The agency didn’t flag safety or manufacturing, but it said the totality of the trials doesn’t support effectiveness and that the mixed results make the positives hard to trust. What’s unusual here is the FDA did not explicitly ask for another trial, and Aldeyra says it doesn’t plan to run one right now, instead pushing for a fast Type A meeting to figure out what, exactly, would get this over the line.
🔹 A federal judge in Massachusetts just paused the RFK Jr. vaccine overhaul. Judge Brian Murphy issued a preliminary injunction blocking the January memo that cut the routine childhood schedule from 17 diseases down to 11, and he also stayed the appointments of the newly installed ACIP members, along with all votes they have taken. The judge’s point was procedural but consequential. HHS sidestepped the normal expert-driven process and replaced the committee without the usual screening, which he said likely violates governing law. Practically, this throws vaccine guidance into limbo again, because the panel “as currently constituted” cannot operate while the injunction stands.
CLINICAL TRIAL UPDATES 📊
🔹 Eli Lilly reported phase 3 results for retatrutide, its “triple agonist” that hits GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon receptors. In TRANSCEND-T2D-1, the drug cut hemoglobin A1C by about 1.7% to 2.0% at 40 weeks across doses and delivered eye-catching weight loss for a type 2 diabetes population: 16.8% on the highest dose in the on-treatment analysis (15.3% including discontinuations), with discontinuations for side effects reported in the low single digits. This doesn’t automatically dethrone tirzepatide on glucose control, but it does reinforce Lilly’s core advantage in obesity and diabetes: it keeps showing up with another credible “next thing,” and the bar for everyone else keeps moving higher.
🔹 Aspen Neuroscience put out twelve-month data from its early ASPIRO trial for Parkinson’s using a personalized cell therapy made from each patient’s own skin cells. In the first eight treated patients (four lower dose, four higher dose), they reported no serious surgery-related adverse events, no severe graft-induced dyskinesia, and imaging consistent with the cells surviving and engrafting. On the “does this feel meaningfully better?” front, both cohorts showed numerical improvements across movement scores, daily function, and quality of life measures, with some patients also cutting their levodopa-equivalent dose. It’s still a tiny, open-label dataset, so you can’t call this proof yet, but it’s a real step forward, and the next big tell will be whether they can replicate anything like this in a larger, more controlled phase 3.
🔹 Rhythm’s phase 3 EMANATE trial for setmelanotide (Imcivree) in several MC4R-pathway rare obesity subtypes missed its prespecified primary endpoint (placebo-adjusted BMI change at 52 weeks across four genetic substudies), which is why the stock dipped. The company is trying to salvage the readout with post hoc signals suggesting meaningful BMI reductions in the heterozygous POMC/PCSK1 and SRC1 (NCOA1) groups, with no new safety issues, but this still reads as “not clean enough” for an immediate label expansion, and it shifts attention to Rhythm’s next-generation melanocortin 4 receptor agonists (bivamelagon and RM-718) for what comes next.
🔹 Candel reported “survival tail” update in its mid-stage non-small cell lung cancer study for CAN-2409 (aglatimagene besadenovec) plus valacyclovir on top of continued checkpoint inhibitors, in patients who already had an inadequate response to prior checkpoint therapy. With another year of follow-up, the company says 50% of 46 per-protocol patients were still alive at 24 months (up from 39% at the prior data cut), which is the kind of number that gets attention in a post-checkpoint setting where expectations are usually grim. They also leaned on biomarker work showing a more inflamed tumor environment after treatment and a broader T cell receptor response, and they’re using the dataset to justify a pivotal phase 3 in non-squamous disease starting in Q2 2026.
🔹 Eledon posted early but eye-catching islet transplant data in long-standing type 1 diabetes. In a 12-patient, investigator-initiated trial at the University of Chicago, 10 of the 12 patients who were at least four weeks post-transplant were insulin-independent, with no reported graft rejection and no new donor-specific human leukocyte antigen antibodies. The bigger “so what” is the regimen: tegoprubart is an anti-CD40 ligand antibody used in a calcineurin-inhibitor-free immunosuppression approach, and the team highlighted the absence of the classic calcineurin inhibitor baggage (kidney toxicity, hypertension, neurotoxicity) in this small cohort. Still early, still small, but it keeps the idea alive that you might protect islet grafts without paying the tacrolimus tax.
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