Pharma Pulse 6/26/25: How CRO Partnerships Are Evolving to Meet Changing Industry Demands; Don’t Fall for the Call of Placebo-Controlled Vaccine Trials

How CRO Partnerships Are Evolving to Meet Changing Industry Demands

In an interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Judith Ng-Cashin, MD, chief medical officer, Novotech, emphasized the need for CRO partnerships to become more collaborative, cost-efficient, and insight-driven in response to evolving regulatory and funding challenges, highlighting Novotech’s award-winning collaboration with Tune Therapeutics as a model for success.

Don’t Fall for the Call of Placebo-Controlled Vaccine Trials

In a Pharmaceutical Executive article, Spreeha Choudhury of Epstein Becker Green warns that calls for placebo-controlled vaccine trials—championed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—are ethically dangerous, medically unnecessary when effective vaccines already exist, and risk repeating the dark history of withholding proven treatments in the name of research.

Is Fluoride Friend or Foe?

The decades-long debate over fluoridated public water has intensified following new toxicology data linking high fluoride levels to lower IQ in children, prompting statewide bans in Utah and Florida, pending legislation in several others, and an FDA move to remove certain fluoride products from the market—all while oral health experts prepare to push back against these sweeping policy changes.

Novel Targeted, Chemo-Free, and Cellular Therapies Are Poised to Transform Treatment Paradigms in B-Cell Malignancies

Alexey Danilov discusses how novel chemotherapy-free regimens, targeted therapies, and CAR T-cell approaches are beginning to transform treatment paradigms in B-cell malignancies such as mantle cell lymphoma and CLL, with a growing emphasis on individualized care, clinical trial participation for high-risk patients, and evolving strategies for sequencing therapies to improve efficacy and safety.

Introducing the Borderline Personality Disorder Inventory

A new psychodynamically-informed screening tool—the Borderline Personality Disorder Inventory—has been introduced to help clinicians more accurately identify core features of borderline pathology, offering a brief, 25-item questionnaire designed to capture deeper personality dynamics often missed by traditional symptom-based assessments.