Roche launches new Boston center; NIH centralizes peer review

This week has brought enough announcements and updates to fill a third news roundup. Today, we’ve got a rundown of news from Roche and AskBio, as well as updates from the NIH and Pfizer.

Roche is expanding its presence in the Boston area, announcing Friday the launch of a new “innovation center” at Harvard University’s Enterprise Research Campus in nearby Allston, Massachusetts. The company plans for its new center to act as a hub for its research work in cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases, as well as to support some of its AI activities. Manu Chakravarthy, Roche’s global head for CVRM product diseases, will lead the site, which eventually could employ as many as 500 people, Roche said. The Swiss drugmaker joins peers like Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly in growing its Boston footprint. — Ned Pagliarulo

The National Institutes of Health said Thursday it will centralize peer review for all grants, research and development contracts and cooperative agreements under a single center. The policy change will apply to the first step of the peer review process, in which review groups score proposals for scientific and technical merit. Of those, 22% have in the past been conducted by individual institutes while the rest are done in the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review. Those done by study groups in the individual centers now will shift to the main Center for Scientific Review. The second step of the peer review process, for mission relevance, will continue to be done by the individual centers or the NIH director’s office. The NIH said the scientific and technical merit reviews conducted by the individual centers cost 300% of those done by the Center for Scientific Review. The policy change will save $65 million a year, NIH said. The policy change follows layoffs at NIH and a Trump administration bid to cut reimbursement of overhead costs at NIH grantees. Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s nominee for NIH director, is awaiting Senate votes on his confirmation. — Jonathan Gardner

AskBio, the gene therapy subsidiary of Bayer, has begun dosing patients in the second cohort of a trial testing its treatment for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. Started in 2023, the study is enrolling adults with a specific “21/R9” form of the progressive muscle-wasting disease. Enrollment of the second cohort follows a review by the trial’s monitoring board of data from the study’s first phase. Sarepta Therapeutics is also developing gene therapies for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. — Ned Pagliarulo

Pfizer on Thursday appointed James List to lead its internal medicine portfolio, putting the endocrinologist in charge of the company’s pipeline of drugs for cardiometabolic diseases, including obesity. List was previously global therapeutic head for cardiovascular and metabolism at Johnson & Johnson and, before that, head of diabetes development at Bristol Myers Squibb. He conducted post-doctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital on GLP-1, the hormone that’s now at the center of obesity treatment. — Ned Pagliarulo

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