Phar­ma is gain­ing ground in a years­long strug­gle over ac­cess to fed­er­al drug dis­counts.

Drug­mak­ers and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment have his­tor­i­cal­ly been on op­pos­ing sides of con­tract phar­ma­cy pol­i­cy un­der 340B. But in a hand­ful of cas­es against state laws, they’ve be­come un­ex­pect­ed al­lies.

For the first time, the agency charged with over­see­ing the 340B pro­gram has de­cid­ed to weigh in on lit­i­ga­tion over state laws that reg­u­late how phar­ma com­pa­nies dis­pense dis­count­ed drugs.

The De­part­ment of Jus­tice, on be­half of HHS, sided with Ab­b­Vie and a lead­ing trade group when it wrote in fa­vor of tem­po­rary blocks on such laws in Col­orado, Maine and Rhode Is­land. DOJ at­tor­neys wrote in am­i­cus briefs filed in Feb­ru­ary and March that states should not have the au­thor­i­ty to en­force 340B.

An am­bi­tious Van­cou­ver start­up is try­ing to en­sure the next big di­a­betes break­through re­tains its ties to Cana­da, un­like the in­sulin de­vel­op­ers of a cen­tu­ry ago.

That start­up, As­pect Biosys­tems, has re­ceived $79 mil­lion from the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment to pur­sue its stem cell-de­rived ther­a­py that en­ables pa­tients to pro­duce their own in­sulin.

The gov­ern­ment mon­ey comes from the Strate­gic Re­sponse Fund, which aims to help Cana­di­an in­dus­tries re­cov­er from the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s tar­iffs and sup­ports re­search in ar­eas in­clud­ing bio­man­u­fac­tur­ing and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.

“This gov­ern­ment deal al­lows us to have the ca­pa­bil­i­ties to go the dis­tance, which is very dif­fer­ent than 100 years ago when in­sulin left Cana­da and cre­at­ed No­vo Nordisk,” As­pect CEO and co­founder Tamer Mo­hamed told End­points News in an in­ter­view.

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump is re­port­ed­ly set to un­veil 100% phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal tar­iffs as soon as Thurs­day, but ac­cord­ing to a draft seen by End­points News, it ap­pears they would on­ly af­fect a small por­tion of drug­mak­ers.

The draft doc­u­ment lays out how Trump is plan­ning to im­ple­ment the tar­iffs on the phar­ma in­dus­try and how drug­mak­ers with “most fa­vored na­tion” deals with the White House will be ex­empt un­til 2029.

While the White House did not im­me­di­ate­ly re­spond to ques­tions from End­points, Bloomberg News re­port­ed some de­tails of the plan Wednes­day, in­clud­ing that they could be an­nounced as soon as to­day. The draft doc­u­ment could still be sub­ject to change be­fore the ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cial­ly an­nounces it.

A day af­ter Eli Lil­ly gained FDA ap­proval for its obe­si­ty pill Foun­dayo, No­vo Nordisk is fight­ing back with an analy­sis that it says shows the su­pe­ri­or­i­ty of its own oral drug.

The Dan­ish drug­mak­er's claims — it says its We­govy pill pro­duces rough­ly 3% greater weight loss than Foun­dayo — pre­view what's cer­tain to be a long-run­ning com­pe­ti­tion be­tween the com­pa­nies as they make sci­en­tif­ic claims and com­pete on price.

For now, No­vo would­n't con­firm or de­ny whether it in­tends to run a head-to-head study of the two pills — the gold stan­dard for any claim of su­pe­ri­or­i­ty. What No­vo has done is crunched num­bers from the main Phase 3 tri­als of the two prod­ucts — Lil­ly's AT­TAIN-1 study of Foun­dayo and its own OA­SIS 4 tri­al of the We­govy pill.