LightNews — News, ranked by scholars

Carla Soares

@outracozinha.bsky.social

Eu botei um chamado CalBio. Eu gosto dele pq é simplão, em pt, não tem muita firula. Pra mim é o suficiente. Tem um outro que chama Biodynamic gardening calendar que tem interface + trabalhada, dá pra vc selecionar e ver dia bom pra poda, mas acho ele menos direto tipo abrir e checar

June 13, 2025 at 1:41 PM

Steph

@stephy.bsky.social

“Given that—in 1988—we had a dominant GLP-1 patent position, excellent scientific staff, sufficient funding, and an alliance with a pharma giant with expertise in diabetes, how is it possible that CalBio/MetaBio didn't become another Genentech on the back of GLP-1 alone?” muse.jhu.edu/article/936213

Project MUSE - Drug Development Failure: How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990

muse.jhu.edu

September 14, 2024 at 11:29 PM

Hacker News

@mm-hacker-news.bsky.social

Pfizer ended up passing on my GLP-1 work back in the early '90s
https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/09/glp-1-history-pfizer-john-baxter-jeffrey-flier-calbio-metabio/

December 27, 2025 at 11:35 PM

Hacker News 100

@hn100.atproto.rocks

Pfizer ended up passing on my GLP-1 work back in the early '90s (2024)
https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/09/glp-1-history-pfizer-john-baxter-jeffrey-flier-calbio-metabio/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405480

How Pfizer ended up passing on my GLP-1 work back in the early ’90s

Even the biggest future blockbuster drugs can be prematurely abandoned.

www.statnews.com

December 28, 2025 at 9:30 AM

generalistimo

@stupw.bsky.social

I'm a type 1 diabetic. I'm unfairly, unkindly callous about type 2 diabetics. I'll trash talk their competence and resolve all day.

But this from the linked first person account is something else. A 199X GLP-1 could have prevented type 2 diabetics from *needing* insulin

muse.jhu.edu/article/936213

Despite our excitement about the work, we noticed a problem with how it was being evaluated by Pfizer, most specifically by Gardiner and Hutson, who had important input to the final decision-makers for Pfizer on the ongoing collaboration. As we were enjoying the positive human infusion data and anticipating a major effort to design both protease resistant GLP-1 analogues and an inhibitor of the responsible protease as new diabetes therapies, I was shocked when told that senior Pfizer leadership had concluded that there would never be another injectable therapy for diabetes other than insulin. What led them to this conclusion was never explained (and of course it proved totally false in the real world over subsequent decades), but the implication for our program was unambiguous. Pfizer stated that continuation of the project would require us to identify a route for GLP-1 administration other than injection, such as trans-nasal or transcutaneous. The MetaBio team and the founders vigorously disagreed with Pfizer's view that an injectable GLP-1 analogue would never be worth developing, but our arguments had no effect. Based on knowledge at the time about trans-nasal and transcutaneous delivery of peptides like GLP-1, and the short half-life of the protein, we considered it extremely unlikely that either approach could be successfully developed. We nevertheless undertook efforts to develop these modalities, and they were predictably unsuccessful.

About three years into the collaboration, Pfizer informed CalBio it would end its commitment after four rather than five years, permitted by the agreement with [End Page 331] due notice. And indeed, they did just that. The other scientific founders and I tried to convince CalBio leadership to seek alternative external funding to continue the promising work, or to fund it internally, but this didn't happen. Why? CalBio's primary focus and most of its funding was to advance development of Natrecor, a project led by the company's scientific director, John Lewicki, work that eventually led to the company's sale to Johnson and Johnson. Via a process that wasn't transparent, our founder's interest in MetaBio was assessed to be of a certain (we considered low) value, and on that basis, our ownership share was "bought out." We pushed back on the terms and obtained legal advice, but in the end we accepted the terms. With that, our nascent efforts to be the first company to develop a GLP-1 based diabetes therapy, either an analogue resistant to degradation, or an inhibitor of the protease we expected would soon be discovered ended, both emerging more than a decade later as blockbuster therapies.

The lens of history is powerful. In this case, retrospective analysis makes it clear that our effort in the GLP-1 therapeutic space was far ahead of its time. If the full force of CalBio and Pfizer had pressed ahead to develop either a more stable GLP-1 analogue, or an inhibitor of the protease that would soon have been identified, it's extremely likely we would have succeeded. Patients would have benefited, and the company's success would have been enormous. What accounted for the decision to precipitously end the work?

A clear answer wasn't evident to me in 1991/92 when MetaBio ceased to function, but it's worth considering some possible explanations. Ceasing the work on GLP-1 and other promising projects was opposed by the MetaBio founders and the MetaBio scientific team, so answering this question has two parts: why did Pfizer make this decision, and why, in response to that decision, did CalBio not continue the work?

A definitive answer with regard to Pfizer would require review of internal records or interviews with key decision-makers, neither of which is possible now, more than 30 years later. What is clear is that the decision by Hutson, Gardiner, and others was mistaken, based on faulty judgments about the potential role of GLP-1 as a therapy for diabetes, the potential for an injectable formulation of GLP-1 analogues to be successfully adopted, and the potential that clinically obvious effects on appetite and gastric emptying might enable future use in obesity therapy, among others. We interacted with the key figures at Pfizer leading metabolic research and those higher up in the corporate pharmaceutical chain of command. I had been deeply impressed by their rapid decision to invest in our company, and I was equally dumbfounded by their decision to end their investment despite convincing early evidence of the program's success. On several occasions in future years, when recounting this history to others in the biopharmaceutical industry—including some a…

August 1, 2026 at 1:54 AM

EL KIOSKO press (news in spanish)

@wizfun.bsky.social

www.catalunyapress.es/articulo/cie...

¿Lechugas resistentes a la sequía? Científicos españoles prometen revolucionar la agricultura

CalBio, el innovador desarrollo que estimula las defensas de las lechugas frente a la sequía y la salinidad, podría cambiar el futuro de la agricultura mediterránea ...

www.catalunyapress.es

January 28, 2025 at 7:34 PM

Hacker News 50

@betterhn50.e-work.xyz

Pfizer ended up passing on my GLP-1 work back in the early '90s (2024) https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/09/glp-1-history-pfizer-john-baxter-jeffrey-flier-calbio-metabio/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405480)

How Pfizer ended up passing on my GLP-1 work back in the early ’90s

Even the biggest future blockbuster drugs can be prematurely abandoned.

www.statnews.com

December 28, 2025 at 1:16 AM

HN

@hnws.bsky.social

How Pfizer ended up passing on my GLP-1 work back in the early '90s
L: https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/09/glp-1-history-pfizer-john-baxter-jeffrey-flier-calbio-metabio/
C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405480
posted on 2025.12.27 at 16:36:22 (c=0, p=4)

December 27, 2025 at 9:58 PM

Thiard News@F4F

@newsen.bsky.social

CalBio's Strategic Expansion: Upgrading Renewable Energy Generation with Mainspring Linear Generators#United_States #California #Renewable_Energy #Mainspring_Energy #CalBio