The best ways to follow biopharma news and learn about the industry (in my opinion)

Last update: June 2023

I was asked at work what sources I use to follow biopharma/medical news and learn about the industry, so I wrote up this post - hopefully it’s useful for others as well! I don’t intend this to be an exhaustive list, but rather a summary of the sources I find the most consistently valuable, having tried many through the years. In addition, at the bottom of this post I made some specific recommendations on where to start if you’re new to the industry.

While writing this I came across this popular post by Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz with the same objective. There’s also this compendium from the folks at Pillar and Petri. Both are good lists. However, I still wanted to add my thoughts because while we mostly agree my focus differs from theirs (I’m a life sciences consultant focused on commercialisation strategy and they are VC’s), and so the sources we choose to emphasize differ too.

Scientific literature

PubMed: The Google search of biotech (check out the trending papers here)
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery: Great combination of industry news, analysis and reviews of cutting-edge drug discovery science
Nature Reviews Disease Primers: Detailed summaries of the epidemiology, pathophysiology, management, unmet needs and outlook for many different diseases. When I’m brushing up on a new therapy area one of the first things I do is check if there’s one of these primers available

Industry news sites

Endpoints news: Excellent source for skimmable news and headlines (many articles require a paid subscription to view)
Evaluate Vantage: High quality analysis that puts industry and pipeline news into context
STAT news: Excellent longform content, breaks a lot of big stories (paywalled but the free stuff is good, too)
BioPharma Dive: In-depth news and articles

Twitter

Twitter is without a doubt the best source for real-time news, debate and discussion on biopharma. While many accounts are worth following (you can see everyone I follow here), these are who I consider to be the “must-follow” accounts:

@bradloncar: Independent investor, mostly tweets about immuno-oncology and China. Posts nice daily/weekly summaries of the performance of key biotech stock indices
@JacobPlieth: Journalist at Evaluate Vantage and snarky commentator on oncology news
@Sports_Bios: Smart (often contrarian) takes on market trends, follows neuroscience and China closely
@bio_clouseau: Frequently picks up biotech news that others miss
@BioStocks: Posts short summaries of company press releases and news updates
@Prof_Oak_: Intelligent commentary on genetic medicine and synthetic biology
@paras_biotech: Regularly shares interesting snippets from biopharma analyst reports
@andrewpannu: In-depth competitive landscape analysis
@BertrandBio: Prolific Tweeter of biopharma company press releases and presentations with a European slant
@AndyBiotech: Hasn’t been active lately, but excellent signal-to-noise ratio when he does post

If you’re not careful with who you follow, Twitter will likely be a huge waste of time. For tips on how to best use Twitter to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio, I suggest this post by Lee Phillips

Blogs

In the Pipeline: The essential industry blog, written by Derek Lowe. His day job is a Novartis medicinal chemist, but he’s much more well known in the industry for his regular commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry
LifeSciVC the long-running blog of VC Bruce Booth (@LifeSciVC on Twitter). Read for insights on biotech venture capital, funding environment, and general industry trends
CureFFI: Deep and personal insight into the journey to develop antisense oligonucleotide drugs for rare prion diseases
Drug truths: Blog of former Pfizer executive John LaMattina (@John_LaMattina on twitter), focusing on US drug pricing and costs
Science-based medicine: Dedicated to debunking medical myths and misinformation
BioByte: Weekly summaries of interesting biotech papers and articles
Nintil: Not a biopharma blog per se, but Jose Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente does regularly post interesting links and takes on adjacent topics such longevity research and effective allocation of R&D funding

Podcasts

On the whole, there are no biotech focused podcasts (that I’m aware of) that I find consistently informative and interesting enough to listen to regularly. Most are too high-level for my tastes. That being said, I do keep an eye on the podcasts below and listen when there’s an interesting topic or guest on.

The Long Run with Luke Timmerman: Hour long autobiographical interviews with high-profile biotech executives. High variance in guest quality; some are fascinating, others less so
Mendelspod: Developments in diagnostics, genetics and genomic medicine
OncoPharm: Quick and straight to the point updates on the latest developments in oncology
Nature podcast: Summaries of the latest splashy scientific papers from the World’s preeminent scientific journal - not always about biotechnology, but often
This Week in Virology: The definitive podcast on virology, running since 2008. The hosts and guests are world leading experts and really know their stuff

Books

For such a systemically important industry, there’s not as many books written about biotech and biopharma as you might think - especially when you exclude ones written for a lay audience. Here are some of the best:

Reference

The Pharmagellan Guide to Analyzing Biotech Clinical Trials: Released in 2022, highly recommended for people new to the industry looking to learn about clinical trials. I expect I’ll be lending it out to some of the new analysts at my firm. There’s not much that will be revelatory for industry veterans; when I read this I had ~5 years of experience in biotech and I was familiar with most of the content, but it was a nice refresher with plenty of useful examples, and I learned a few new things too
Forecasting for the Pharmaceutical Industry: Models for New Product and In-Market Forecasting and How to Use Them: Getting a bit dated now (released in 2006), but still a useful overview of the common forecasting methodologies in the pharmaceutical industry. A great starting point for someone looking to learn how to forecast product revenue in biotech, and anyone looking for a brisk overview of the different methodologies available for pre and post-launch product forecasting (e.g., prevalence or incidence models, system dynamics, trend-based, etc.)
The Pharmagellan Guide to Biotech Forecasting and Valuation: This slim volume has been an invaluable reference that I revisit almost every time I build a forecast model. While the content is US-centric and the coverage of some topics is overly high-level, the page-for-page density of useful information and benchmarks is very high
New Product Planning Playbook: Developed by a network of new product planning executives, this playbook is a comprehensive overview of what the commercial function in biopharma does to prepare for a new launch
Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care?: A comparative primer on 11 healthcare systems (US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the UK) including organisation, funding, and performance. Dry and repetitive at times, but dense with useful information

Corporate histories

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech: The story of how recombinant DNA technology was commercialized. 40 years or so later Genentech (now part of Roche) is still one of the giants in the industry, and everyone in the industry should be aware of their history
The Antidote: A Small Competitor Challenges the Drug Giants: Conquests in New Pharma: Vertex is one of the great success stories of genomic medicine, phenotypic screening and collaboration with patient groups. This book is a fascinating insight into the ups and downs they experienced on the road to launching their hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis drugs, and the role luck plays in drug development
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: The rise and fall of the fraudulent blood testing company Theranos. As gripping as any thriller, I finished this book in a day
Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom: A chronicle of the broken culture of the Indian generic drug manufacturer Ranbaxy, and the absurd lengths they went to to circumvent the FDA. Worth reading for an entertaining lesson on the generic drug industry
For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug: The story of Pharmacyclics, Imbruvica, and the BTKi class. A gripping tale of perseverence in biotech featuring a memorable cast of characters
A Rare Breed: How people and perseverance built BioMarin into one of the world’s most innovative companies: Overly hagiographic in parts, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. The moral of the story, if any, is that success comes when you pick a focus and stick to it, which for BioMarin was (and is) rare diseases, enzyme replacement therapies and manufacturing of complex biologics
Science Lessons: What the Business of Biotech Taught Me About Management: The early days of Amgen as told by its former CEO Gordon Binder. I wavered on including this one because while it’s a fine book with solid insights on financing and people management, you won’t miss too much if you skip it

Clinical memoirs

When Breath Becomes Air: A beautiful and haunting memoir of a dying neurosurgeon, just read it!
Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them: A brief tour through the problems with the way we conceptualize and study neurodegenerative brain diseases. I really liked how the book interspersed sections written by a clinician and a Parkinson’s disease patient advocate. It’s a unique format and helped put the clinical information into a patient-relevant context
When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia: A fantastic portrait of life as a physician in the heme/onc ward. Makes effective use of patient stories to put the science and treatment of blood cancers into context
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures: A narrative about the clash of traditional cultural beliefs with western medicine, told through the lens of an immigrant family dealing with their severely epileptic child. Skilfully written in a manner that makes you emphasize with both parties
Caring for the Heart: Mayo Clinic and the Rise of Specialization: The history of cardiology (mainly diagnostics and surgery), and how it was intertwined with the founding and rising eminence of the Mayo clinic
Chasing Men on Fire: The Story of the Search for a Pain Gene: Nav1.7 and the path from target identification to the clinic

Other

Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science: An exposé of the big problems with science today, and why much of what is published cannot be relied upon
The Eighth Day of Creation: The definitive history of molecular biology. While it can drag in parts, no other history of this period I’ve come across is as vivid or detailed
The Art of Statistics: An understanding of statistics is essential in biotech, an this is an excellent refresher

For new biotech books, I like to check the MIT press website from time to time; they seem to be the most consistent publisher of quality titles.

Miscellaneous

Biotech Hangout on Twitter spaces: Essentially a live podcast that takes place (almost) every Friday at 6PM CEST / 12PM EDT and runs for about an hour, hosted by Daphne Zohar, Brad Loncar, Chris Garabedian, and other prominent regular guests. The format is usually a recap of weekly news, followed by discussion with a guest then audience Q&A. The guests and discussions are consistently high quality, and interesting people from the audience often drop in to ask questions or share their perspectives
BiotechTV: This is Brad Loncar’s new venture that only just launched. Brad has been conducting brief yet informative video interviews with biotech executives, journalists, and scientists for a while now and recently decided to go full-time. A nice aspect of Brad’s coverage is that he tends to interview people who have important roles in the biotech ecosystem yet rarely get airtime on the major generalist media outlets

Specialized databases and search engines

Open-access

Clinicaltrials.gov: A US-based clinical trials registry, but usually all relevant trials are listed here regardless of where they are taking place in the world. Other countries and regions typically have their own databases too (e.g., clinicaltrialsregister.eu for the EU), but you rarely need to use them too
DrugBank: Database of drugs including mechanisms of action, pharmacology, properties, etc.
Malacards: Database of diseases. Consolidates a lot of useful information on genetics, pathophysiology, related diseases, trials, papers, etc. from multiple sources
Drugs@FDA and DailyMed: US drug labelling information/approval histories
EMA website: EU drug labelling information/approval histories. Their search doesn’t always surface the most relevant pages so I usually just search Google for “[drug name] site: www.ema.europa.eu”
Orphanet and National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD): Rare disease databases and information
SEC EDGAR: Background information on US-listed public companies. Search by ticker symbol for 10-K (annual reports) and S-1 (IPO prospectus)
MedlinePlus: Handy US government reference with disease summaries, references and links (especially the genetics pages)
OpenTargets: Aggregator with clean, well-organised summaries of drug targets and associated genetic evidence (among other bioinformatics data)

Paid resources:

UpToDate: Immensely useful disease overviews and summaries of the latest clinical practice
GlobalData, AdisInsight, Pharmaprojects, and EvaluatePharma (among others) are extremely helpful - albeit very expensive - pipeline and sales revenue databases
There are many paid and/or specialized country specific drug pricing databases (e.g., RED BOOK for US prices, Navlin) that I won’t go into in detail on, but it’s useful to know they exist

Where should I start if I’m brand new and don’t know anything about the industry yet?

It’s hard to put myself in that situation again so my advice may not be optimal, but here’s what I think I’d do now if I suddenly forgot everything and had to start again:

If you need to brush up on your science, iBiology has some top-quality free lectures from leading experts talking about their research. The Molecular Biology of the Cell is a classic textbook. Otherwise, there’s always Wikipedia; this article is probably as good a place as any to start
Read Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
Check for relevant courses on the big MOOC platforms like edX and Coursera. I haven’t taken this one from MIT on the The Science and Business of Biotechnology so I can’t personally recommend it, but the syllabus looks good
Read The Entrepreneur’s Guide to a Biotech Startup (PDF available here) for an overview of the kinds of questions that are important for developing and commercializing a drug. While the book is somewhat old (2004) much of the content is still relevant
Read The Pharmagellan Guide to Analyzing Biotech Clinical Trials. Understanding clinical trials is foundational knowledge for people in this industry and you can’t be credible without it
Read Forecasting for the Pharmaceutical Industry: Models for New Product and In-Market Forecasting and How to Use Them to understand how product forecasts are built and used to make investment decisions
Subscribe to the The Readout Loud podcast for a weekly newbie-friendly recap of high-profile industry news