STAT+: Biotech investors’ plea to Trump, and a busy M&A week
Why it matters: The tariffs, set to take effect within months, could raise costs and disrupt supply chains for midsized biotech firms.
- Trump administration is using newly announced 100% tariffs as leverage to push drugmakers into confidential pricing and manufacturing agreements, mirroring earlier negotiations with larger companies.
- Smaller pharmaceutical companies are being offered a way to sidestep these tariffs by agreeing to lower prices and potentially shift manufacturing to the U.S., a move BIO CEO John Crowley notes is challenging for firms that develop over half of FDA-approved medicines but lack capital for dedicated facilities.
- The tariffs, while set at 100%, include significant loopholes allowing companies to avoid them entirely by agreeing to lower prices and build U.S. manufacturing, or reduce rates to 20% by pledging to shift production stateside, leading Alanna Temme of the Midsized Biotech Alliance of America to express concern about harm to American biotech.
- The burgeoning peptide craze highlights a trust gap in medicine, as physician Vikas Patel observed patients abandoning proven treatments like statins for unproven online peptides, suggesting a troubling shift where validated drugs are perceived as less safe.
The Trump administration is leveraging new 100% tariffs on imported brand-name drugs to pressure both large and small drugmakers into confidential agreements for lower prices and U.S. manufacturing, a strategy riddled with carveouts that may blunt its overall impact but still raises concerns about supply chain disruption. This aggressive push coincides with a growing "trust gap" in medicine, where patients are increasingly opting for unproven treatments like peptides over well-established, evidence-backed drugs such as statins.
