Just a few weeks ago, Eli Lil­ly ex­ec­u­tives cut the rib­bon of what they called phar­ma’s most pow­er­ful su­per­com­put­er.

On Mon­day, Roche shared plans to steal that ti­tle.

The Swiss drug­mak­er an­nounced an ex­pand­ed part­ner­ship with AI chip gi­ant Nvidia to build out the most pow­er­ful com­put­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties in the in­dus­try. The an­nounce­ment, timed to the first day of Nvidia’s an­nu­al GTC con­fer­ence, de­scribed it as the “largest an­nounced hy­brid-cloud AI fac­to­ry” in bio­phar­ma.

In 2023, Roche’s Genen­tech unit signed a mul­ti­year col­lab­o­ra­tion with Nvidia to bol­ster its com­put­ing pow­er. Mon­day’s ex­pand­ed deal cov­ers the broad­er Swiss en­ter­prise, span­ning its drugs and di­ag­nos­tics busi­ness­es and ar­eas like dis­cov­ery, man­u­fac­tur­ing and sales. The com­pute pow­er will be used to train and run AI mod­els across those parts of Roche’s busi­ness.

Bi­cy­cle Ther­a­peu­tics plans to cut its op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es in half to pre­serve cash, lay­ing off about 30% of its staff and end­ing work on two ear­ly tri­als, the com­pa­ny an­nounced.

Bi­cy­cle made the moves af­ter "reg­u­la­to­ry feed­back" that sug­gest­ed the de­sign of a Phase 2/3 tri­al, Du­rav­elo-2, is "no longer con­sid­ered ac­cept­able as an ap­proval path" for the com­pa­ny's ex­per­i­men­tal drug ze­lenec­tide in metasta­t­ic urothe­lial can­cer.

Bi­cy­cle said it will try to con­vert that study to a ran­dom­ized Phase 2 tri­al while "de­ter­min­ing ap­pro­pri­ate next steps" for the ex­per­i­men­tal drug. It will al­so end two Phase 1/2 tri­als of ze­lenec­tide, one in Nectin-4-am­pli­fied breast can­cer and an­oth­er in Nectin-4-am­pli­fied non-small cell lung can­cer.

Rhythm Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals’ Im­civree has hit a snag on the way to a ma­jor ap­proval dead­line.

The biotech’s MC4R ag­o­nist failed to sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce weight in a Phase 3 tri­al that en­rolled pa­tients with rare, ge­net­i­cal­ly dri­ven forms of obe­si­ty. But Wall Street an­a­lysts were large­ly un­fazed by Mon­day’s an­nounce­ment, fo­cus­ing in­stead on this Fri­day's PDU­FA date for Im­civree in a broad­er in­di­ca­tion — ac­quired hy­po­thal­a­m­ic obe­si­ty — as a much more im­por­tant mile­stone.

Leerink an­a­lysts de­scribed the tri­al fail­ure as a “small bump in the road,” while TD Cowen an­a­lysts char­ac­ter­ized it as a “mod­est dis­ap­point­ment.” Rhythm’s share price RYTM dropped about 1.7% in pre-mar­ket trad­ing Tues­day.

Plus, news about Genen­tech, Mestag a