Today, a brief rundown of news involving Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, as well as updates from Spero Therapeutics, Chai Discovery, AdvanCell and Summit Therapeutics that you may have missed.
Shares of Johnson & Johnson fell nearly 3% Wednesday even though the company lifted its financial forecasts for the year. In its latest quarterly earnings report, J&J said sales within its innovative medicines division climbed 6.8% between April and June, primarily boosted by cancer drugs like Darzalex and Carvykti, the immune disease treatment Tremfya and the depression medications Caplyta and Spravato. It now expects company sales to reach between $100.8 billion and $101.4 billion in 2026, versus the $100.3 billion to $101.3 billion range it previously projected. Still, J&J’s overall oncology business missed consensus Wall Street estimates, as the prostate cancer medicine Erleada and blood cancer treatment Imbruvica both fell short of expectations, wrote RBC Capital Markets analyst Shagun Singh. The company’s medical device division disappointed, too, though Singh added that her team “remain[s] positive” on J&J’s 2026 outlook and path towards “double-digit growth” by the end of the decade.
AstraZeneca agreed to pay Shanghai-based drugmaker Dizal $600 million up front, and possibly up to $1.5 billion overall, for worldwide rights to a marketed medicine for lung cancer. The deal announced Tuesday was centered around Zegfrovy, a drug that targets DNA insertions in the so-called exon 20 region of a gene named EGFR. Zegfrovy is already approved in the U.S. and China for non-small cell lung cancer patients who have those alterations, and generated about $85 million in sales during the 2025 fiscal year. The drug is likely to add “modest revenues” towards AstraZeneca’s $80 billion sales target, and could offer “synergies” with its other lung cancer drugs, wrote Leerink Partners analyst Andrew Berens. It also has multiple established and emerging competitors, among them experimental treatments from Cullinan Therapeutics and ArriVent BioPharma.
Spero Therapeutics also turned to China to boost its pipeline, announcing Tuesday it’s licensed most rights to an experimental immune disease drug from Innovent Biologics. That treatment, IBI355, is an antibody aimed at CD40L, a signaling protein involved in inflammation. Spero intends to test it in a Phase 2 study in IgG4-related disease next year, while Innovent plans to evaluate it in a separate mid-stage trial in Sjögren’s syndrome. For Spero, the deal represents a pivot away from antibiotic drug development after helping bring to market a treatment called Utebzi that’s now sold by GSK. Innovent, meanwhile, could receive as much as $1.1 billion in the partnership, including an unspecified upfront payment.
Chai Discovery has raised $400 million in a Series C round that values the AI drug discovery specialist at $3.8 billion. Led by Index Ventures and involving Dimension, Kleiner Perkins and many other investors, the funding is the second-largest venture financing of 2026 among the the firms BioPharma Dive tracks. It’ll support Chai’s ongoing efforts to build AI models that can help larger drugmakers more quickly unearth new medicines. Chai already has partnerships in place with Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novartis.
Radiopharmaceuticals startup AdvanCell also raised one of the year’s top venture rounds, securing $315 million from an investor group led by Ally Bridge Group and including Eli Lilly as well as Sanofi’s venture arm. The Series D funding will help advance an experimental prostate cancer treatment toward late-stage testing and fund its broader pipeline, which involves alpha particle-emitting radiopharmaceuticals.
Summit Therapeutics has sold off an experimental antibiotic that was once its focus. On Tuesday, Toronto-based Biossil acquired rights to ridinilazole, a treatment Summit previously evaluated in a Phase 3 trial for C. difficile infections before changing course to focus on the cancer immunotherapy ivonescimab. While ridinilazole missed the goal of that study, “numerical differences” favored the treatment over standard-of-care vancoymcin and Biossil could “unlock its potential,” co-CEO Robert Duggan said in a statement. Summit is eligible for up to $104.5 million in potential payouts, but is only gaining $500,000 in guaranteed cash.
