Category: 3. Business

The Dublin, Ohio-based chain said during a conference call with investors Friday that it planned to begin closing restaurants in the fourth quarter of this year. The company said it expected a “mid-single-digit percentage” of its U.S. stores to be affected, but it didn’t give any more details.

Wendy’s ended the third quarter with 6,011 U.S. restaurants. If 5% of those locations were impacted, it would mean 300 store closures.

The new round of closures comes on top of the closure of 240 U.S. Wendy’s locations in 2024. At the time, Wendy’s said that many of the 55-year-old chain’s restaurants are simply out of date.

Ken Cook, Wendy’s interim CEO, said Friday the company believes closing locations that are underperforming – whether it’s from a financial or customer service perspective – will help improve traffic and profitability at its remaining U.S. restaurants.

Cook became Wendy’s CEO in July after the company’s previous CEO, Kirk Tanner, left to become the president and CEO of Hershey Co.

“When we look at the system today, we have some restaurants that do not elevate the brand and are a drag from a franchisee financial performance perspective. The goal is to address and fix those restaurants,” Cook said during a conference call with investors.

Cook said in some cases, Wendy’s will make improvements to struggling stores, including adding technology or equipment. In other cases, it will transfer ownership to a different operator or close the restaurant altogether.

U.S. fast food chains have been struggling to attract lower-income U.S. consumers in the past few years as inflation has raised prices. In the July-September period, Wendy’s said its U.S. same-store sales, or sales at locations open at least a year, fell 5% compared to the same period last year.

Cook said $5 and $8 meal deals — which have been matched by McDonald’s — have helped bring some traffic back to its U.S. stores. But Wendy’s isn’t doing a good job of bringing in new customers, Cook said, so the company plans to shift its marketing to emphasize its value and the freshness of its ingredients.

Wendy’s shares dropped 7% Friday. On Monday, they were down 6% in afternoon trading.

In his annual shareholder letter—the last one he will pen as CEO before Berkshire vice chair Greg Abel takes over on Jan. 1—Buffett suggested chief executives are driven by greed and selfishness to drive up their own pay after seeing competitors ratchet up their own remunerations.

“What often bothers very wealthy CEOs—they are human, after all—is that other CEOs are getting even richer,” he said. “Envy and greed walk hand in hand. And what consultant ever recommended a serious cut in CEO compensation or board payments?”

Buffett’s remarks come on the heels of Tesla investors approving CEO Elon Musk’s record-breaking $1 trillion pay package on Thursday. The compensation package, contingent on the EV company reaching an $8.5 trillion market capitalization, would make the already-world’s-richest-man into the first trillionaire. Musk’s net worth is currently about $449 billion.

The next day, EV competitor Rivian announced a $4.6 billion compensation package for CEO RJ Scaringe over the next decade, modeled after Musk’s plan. The package, which would double Scaringe’s base salary of $2 billion, is also dependent on the automaker reaching certain operating income and cash flow targets over the next seven years.

Tesla and Rivian did not immediately respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.

Buffett, reflecting on 60 years of leading his multi-industry conglomerate, said in his letter that companies’ disclosures of CEO pay was in part an effort to make executives at least a little self-conscious about the amount of money they were earning. However, what was intended as a gesture to humble instead became a contest of superiority.

“During my lifetime, reformers sought to embarrass CEOs by requiring the disclosure of the compensation of the boss compared to what was being paid to the average employee,” Buffett said. “Proxy statements promptly ballooned to 100-plus pages compared to 20 or less earlier. But the good intentions didn’t work; instead they backfired.” 

“Based on the majority of my observations—the CEO of company ‘A’ looked at his competitor at company ‘B’ and subtly conveyed to his board that he should be worth more. Of course, he also boosted the pay of directors and was careful who he placed on the compensation committee,” he added. “The new rules produced envy, not moderation.”

Indeed, compensation packages have swelled extravagantly, climbing 34.7% among the U.S.’s 100 largest low-wage employers from 2019 to 2024, according to an August report from the Institute for Policy Studies. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio similarly ballooned, growing from 560:1 in 2019 to 632:1 last year. Inordinate pay packages have helped make the country’s wealthiest billionaires $698 billion richer this year, per an Oxfam report published this month. Buffett, in contrast, has an annual salary of $100,000 (though his net worth sits at around $150 billion thanks to his investments, making him the 11th richest person on earth).

Other financial giants have spoken out against exorbitant pay packages, Musk’s in particular. Norges Investment Management, the entity behind Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund and a 1.14% stakeholder in Tesla, voted against Musk’s compensation plan.

“While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role,” the group said in a statement last week, “we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk—consistent with our views on executive compensation.”

Following the March 2025 decision by the FDA to expand the indication of lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan (Pluvicto) to include adult patients with prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)–positive metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who have received an androgen receptor pathway inhibitor (ARPI) for whom a delay of taxane-based chemotherapy is appropriate, key factors such as the nature of disease progression and patient preferences and treatment goals must be carefully weighed to properly identify ideal candidates for this approach, according to Daniel J. George, MD.¹

Radioligand Therapy vs Chemotherapy in mCRPC

• In March 2025, the FDA expanded the indication of lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan to include adult patients with PSMA-positive mCRPC who have received an ARPI and for whom a delay of taxane-based chemotherapy is appropriate.

• Factors to consider when selecting between lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan and chemotherapy in this setting include the nature of disease progression, patient- and disease-related factors, and patient preference.

• Ongoing studies could help define a role for radioligand therapy in earlier prostate cancer settings.

The regulatory decision was based on data from the phase 3 PSMAfore trial (NCT04689828), which showed that patients who received the radioligand therapy achieved a significant radiographic progression-free survival compared with those who transitioned to another ARPI (HR, 0.41; 95% CI, 0.29-0.56; P < .0001). The expanded indication followed the initial March 2022 FDA approval of the agent for the treatment of adult patients with PSMA-positive mCRPC who previously received an ARPI and taxane-based chemotherapy.²

In an interview with OncLive®, George, the Eleanor Easley Distinguished Professor in the School of Medicine, Medicine, Medical Oncology, a professor of Medicine, Medicine, Medical Oncology; and a professor in urology at Duke Health in Durham, North Carolina, discussed which patients he considers for treatment with lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan, the future of radioligand therapy in prostate cancer, and other novel treatment approaches being investigated for patients who experience disease progression on an ARPI-based regimen.

OncLive: What is your approach for treating patients with mCRPC who experience disease progression following an ARPI-based regimen?

George: When patients have metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer [(mHSPC) and are receiving] an ARPI, the prognosis can be quite good in some cases, particularly in those with good prostate-specific antigen [PSA] responses. As the disease progresses into castration-resistant metastatic disease on an ARPI, the clock is ticking.

These are patients who need to be aware, even if they feel well and asymptomatic, that their life expectancy is in that 2-to-3-year range, and it’s not indefinite. The changes are going to come quicker; the need to take on potentially more adverse effects with cytotoxic therapy is going to be greater, and [we need] to recognize that the expectations of therapy are going to be more modest in this setting. With all that said, it’s a spectrum. We have patients who have slow PSA rising and minimal metastatic disease burden on ARPI, for whom we’re going to be comfortable doing a clinical trial of an investigational, unproven agent. We’re going to be comfortable using sipuleucel-T [Provenge] and other types of less immediately cytotoxic therapies.

[Many] patients will have more rapidly progressive disease, higher volume disease, and risk of complications and symptoms. For those patients, using cytotoxic therapy, whether that’s taxane-based therapy or a radioligand therapy, [such as] lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan, is the first major treatment decision.

What are some of the factors you consider when deciding to give chemotherapy or deferring it in favor of radioligand therapy to a patient with mCRPC who is eligible for both treatments?

When I’m addressing a patient at that critical juncture of post-ARPI with disease progression, I’m looking at a couple of things. How is that disease progression? Is it clinical? Is it radiographic? Is it PSA only? Is it a combination of all 3? I’m looking at their tumor volume as well, and at whether the patient is a chemotherapy candidate.

In the real world, a lot of ou r patients are just not good chemotherapy candidates. [Even] if they are, it’s going to come at a physical cost. They [are often] frail and [have] other [comorbidities] that are going to clinically worsen from that chemotherapy. These are the factors that I [use to determine] whether they’re good up-front chemotherapy candidates. If they are willing, starting chemotherapy is a good choice because we know that lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan has an [overall] survival [OS] benefit post-chemotherapy.

We also know that [lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan] has a significant benefit prechemotherapy, and for many of our patients who are not chemotherapy candidates. I use chemotherapy fitness as my first judge, and then it’s patient preference. At the end of the day, they get a voice and this a shared decision. A lot of patients want to put chemotherapy off until they really need to do it, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that. Starting with lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan in the majority of patients is absolutely a reasonable course.

What is your approach to PSMA testing when you are considering using lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan?

[To me, when a patient] has emerging castrate resistance in their disease, that’s the best time to get a PSMA-PET scan. First, it’s our best staging. It’s our most sensitive test for assessing the full extent of the disease, and it gives me peace of mind that there isn’t visceral disease hiding in there. If it is lymph node–only disease, I can feel confident there isn’t [disease] in the bone. Importantly, if there’s oligometastatic disease, if these patients have 1 or 2 areas that are growing but really the rest of the disease is still ARPI responsive, I’ll consider some of these are patients for tumor-directed radiotherapies.

It’s also a theranostic for lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan and I use it as such. It’s important also to be able to gauge at this point in time how ubiquitous and intense that PSMA uptake is. I’m also talking with my nuclear medicine physicians about the scan and their interpretation.

Where do you see the story of radioligand therapy going next within the prostate cancer treatment paradigm?

Lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan has shown us is that there is a role for this therapy throughout the disease continuum, from hormone-sensitive disease all the way through chemotherapy-refractory castration-resistant disease. Not unlike how ARPIs were developed, the goalposts have changed as we move into these other disease spaces.

I’m less worried about being able to see the OS end points as we move earlier and earlier [into new disease settings], because there are so many other things that affect the outcomes in these patients. I’m more interested in the ability to get to minimal residual disease [MRD]. If we think about what our goals are for patients with early mHSPC, historically we’ve [designed] the registrational trials to look at rPFS and OS, but if you talk about our patients, those aren’t necessarily their goals. They want to get to MRD and to get off therapy.

In the future, if radioligand therapies are part of the mix of treatments, whether they be up-front combinations or induction followed by consolidation or maintenance therapy, they may allow us to get patients off treatment—maybe not all patients, but some patients in the metastatic, hormone-sensitive setting. That’s going to be an important aspect of this.

Our goal as patient advocates is ultimately to come up with a combination or sequence of therapies that get us to MRD in the greatest number of patients and ultimately get patients off treatment. If that’s a cure, that’s wonderful, but even a break from therapy for these patients is welcome in order to restore some of their functionality and overall health.

Are there any novel agents being developed for patients with mCRPC that are of particular interest to you?

It’s probably one of the most exciting times in prostate cancer drug development right now. We have more mechanisms to target now than ever before, and what started out as just basically the AR pathway has now expanded to PSMA-targeted approaches—not just radioligands, but potentially antibody-drug conjugates and bispecific antibodies.

Beyond PSMA, we’re seeing evidence for [targeting] KLK2 and STEAP2 [alterations]. We’re getting more targets in prostate cancer, and we’re getting mechanisms to start targeting. Other targets that are drivers of more aggressive forms of prostate cancer, and more androgen-independent forms of prostate cancer are coming into clinic. This is an incredibly important aspect, because before we were limited to what we could target in prostate cancer. We’d get these next-generation sequences and our big list of mutations, and things would be non-actionable.

You’re going to see now more and more actionable targets in that profiling is going to become more and more critical in how we’re treat these patients. That’s going to make the testing and diagnostics all the more important. And I hope you know that today, we can already justify doing that on a systematic level for everybody with advanced prostate cancer, knowing that these therapies are coming.

References

1. FDA expands Pluvicto’s metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer indication. FDA. March 28, 2025. Accessed November 10, 2025. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/resources-information-approved-drugs/fda-expands-pluvictos-metastatic-castration-resistant-prostate-cancer-indication
2. FDA approves Pluvicto for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. FDA. March 23, 2022. Accessed November 10, 2025. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/resources-information-approved-drugs/fda-approves-pluvicto-metastatic-castration-resistant-prostate-cancer?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

The S&P 500 climbed 1.3% to claw back three-quarters of its drop from last week, which was its first weekly loss in four. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 245 points, or 0.5%, as of 1:15 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 2.1% higher.

Nvidia was by far the strongest force lifting the market and rallied 4.8%. It’s a bounceback after Nvidia and other winners in the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology were at the center of last week’s drop. Critics say their stock prices shot too high and too fast in the mania around AI, drawing comparisons to the 2000 dot-com bubble that ultimately burst.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes chips for Nvidia and other companies, saw its stock that trades in United States rise 3.1% after reporting that its revenue climbed nearly 17% in October from a year earlier. While such growth is strong compared with other companies, it’s a slowdown from TSMC’s earlier performance.

Another AI darling, Palantir Technologies, jumped 8.9% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500. That helped it recover some of its loss since it delivered a profit report last week that topped analysts’ expectations.

Losses for health insurers helped keep the market’s gains in check, though. They fell as uncertainty remains about whether Washington will extend expiring health care tax credits, a sticking point on Capitol Hill that’s created the longest-ever shutdown for the U.S. government.

That’s even as the Senate took the first steps on Sunday to end the shutdown.

President Donald Trump suggested in a social media post over the weekend that cash being sent to “money sucking” insurance companies should instead go directly to people so they can buy their own health insurance.

Humana fell 3.3%, Elevance Health sank 3.8% and Centene dropped 7.6%.

The effects of the government’s shutdown have become more apparent following the cancellations of thousands of flights over the weekend. Towers are facing shortages as some air traffic controllers — unpaid for weeks — have stopped showing up for work.

Besides the pain at airports, the U.S. government’s shutdown has also delayed important reports on the economy. A resumption could upset financial markets if the released logjam shows data that dashes traders’ expectations for coming cuts to interest rates.

The wide expectation is for the Federal Reserve to continue cutting its main interest rate in hopes of shoring up what has been a slowing job market. Wall Street loves lower interest rates because they can give the economy a boost while also pushing prices for investments upward.

But the Fed has said it may have to halt its cuts if inflation worsens because lower interest rates can give inflation more fuel.

Without updates from the U.S. government on jobs and the economy, traders have instead been trawling profit reports from companies for clues about how things are going.

Tyson Foods climbed 1.6% after the seller of chicken and other proteins reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It benefited from increases in prices for its pork and beef of 11% to 17%.

Roughly four out of every five companies in the S&P 500 that have reported their results for the summer have also topped analysts’ profit expectations so far, according to FactSet. Companies usually beat analysts’ estimates each quarter, but the pressure was high this time around because they needed to justify the big moves upward for their stock prices since April.

Delivering bigger profits is one of the easier ways companies can quiet criticism that their stock prices have become too expensive.

Companies have also been giving generally strong forecasts for upcoming results, according to Bank of America strategist Savita Subramanian. That has analysts’ expectations for earnings in 2026 nearly all the way back to where they were before Trump shocked financial markets with his “Liberation Day” announcement of worldwide tariffs in April.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rallied across much of Europe and Asia.

South Korea’s Kospi jumped 3% for one of the bigger gains. Chip company SK Hynix, which is cooperating with Nvidia on artificial intelligence, leaped 4.5%. Its bigger rival, Samsung Electronics, climbed 2.8%.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.10% from 4.11% late Friday.

Wendy’s plans to close hundreds U.S. restaurants over the next few months in an effort to boost its profit.

The Dublin, Ohio-based chain said during a conference call with investors Friday that it planned to begin closing restaurants in the fourth quarter of this year. The company said it expected a “mid-single-digit percentage” of its U.S. stores to be affected, but it didn’t give any more details.

Wendy’s ended the third quarter with 6,011 U.S. restaurants. If 5% of those locations were impacted, it would mean 300 store closures.

The new round of closures comes on top of the closure of 240 U.S. Wendy’s locations in 2024. At the time, Wendy’s said that many of the 55-year-old chain’s restaurants are simply out of date.

Ken Cook, Wendy’s interim CEO, said Friday the company believes closing locations that are underperforming – whether it’s from a financial or customer service perspective – will help improve traffic and profitability at its remaining U.S. restaurants.

Cook became Wendy’s CEO in July after the company’s previous CEO, Kirk Tanner, left to become the president and CEO of Hershey Co.

“When we look at the system today, we have some restaurants that do not elevate the brand and are a drag from a franchisee financial performance perspective. The goal is to address and fix those restaurants,” Cook said during a conference call with investors.

Cook said in some cases, Wendy’s will make improvements to struggling stores, including adding technology or equipment. In other cases, it will transfer ownership to a different operator or close the restaurant altogether.

U.S. fast food chains have been struggling to attract lower-income U.S. consumers in the past few years as inflation has raised prices. In the July-September period, Wendy’s said its U.S. same-store sales, or sales at locations open at least a year, fell 5% compared to the same period last year.

Cook said $5 and $8 meal deals — which have been matched by McDonald’s — have helped bring some traffic back to its U.S. stores. But Wendy’s isn’t doing a good job of bringing in new customers, Cook said, so the company plans to shift its marketing to emphasize its value and the freshness of its ingredients.

Wendy’s shares dropped 7% Friday. On Monday, they were down 6% in afternoon trading.

 

Some of the largest chemical companies in the world—Arkema, BASF, Cargill, Dow, and LG Chemical among them—have attempted to make acrylic acid via a biobased route. It stands to reason that they would. The product is the key raw material for making the superabsorbent polymers found in diapers and incontinence products, which have a reputation for generating a lot of waste. Acrylic acid derivatives are also ubiquitous in acrylic paints and adhesives. To make it from renewable raw materials rather than fossil fuels would be a big win.

“The market has desired a biobased acrylic for quite some time, 20-some-odd years at this point, and no one’s ever made the economics work,” says Christopher P. Nicholas, chief technology officer and cofounder of Låkril Technologies.

Nicholas thinks Låkril has the catalyst that will allow the firm to succeed where others have failed.

The conventional process for making acrylic acid is the oxidation of propylene into acrolein, followed by another oxidation into acrylic acid. This petrochemical pathway is responsible for nearly all the 7 million metric tons (t) of acrylic acid produced annually around the world.

Companies have attempted two main routes to a biobased alternative, both involving dehydration of a monomer made via sugar fermentation. One—tried by firms such as BASF, Cargill, and Dow—starts with 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP). The other is based on lactic acid, a pathway that Cargill is investigating with technology licensed from the diaper producer Procter & Gamble.

The lactic acid route has its appeal. 3-HP is not made in significant quantities, whereas lactic acid has been commercially produced via fermentation since the 1880s, Nicholas points out. Today, about 2 million t of it is made annually by companies like Cargill and Corbion via fermentation of sugars from corn or other local crops. The lactic is then used to produce derivatives such as the biobased polymer polylactic acid.

The chemistry of lactic acid is challenging, however. “The two molecules—the feedstock lactic acid and the product acrylic acid—are probably two of the most reactive molecules I’ve had to work with over the course of my career,” Nicholas says. “Both of them love to polymerize, and it’s why they’re essentially good monomers, but it’s also quite a pain to work with them in the lab.”

In addition, being an α-hydroxy acid, lactic acid is more difficult to dehydrate than 3-HP, which is a β-hydroxy acid. This obstacle is a reason that, despite the commercial availability of lactic acid, many firms have pursued a 3-HP route.

Låkril’s catalyst gives the lactic acid route the advantage by achieving dehydration better than any previous effort had, according to Nicholas. The catalyst was discovered in 2020 at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities lab of chemical engineer Paul J. Dauenhauer, a Låkril cofounder. Dauenhauer had been working on improvements to zeolite catalysts for the transformation of lactates into acrylates. He found that bifunctional zeolite catalysts with engineered bases could control the dehydration of α-hydroxy acids with high efficiency.

Nicholas says the catalyst produces acrylic acid at a yield of 90%. Previous efforts at dehydration of lactic acid achieved yields of only 80–85%.

“The largest contributor to the cash cost of production of bio-acrylic acid is the lactic acid,” Nicholas says. “You can’t afford to throw any of the feedstock away as off-spec product. So the biggest thing that you need is high selectivity.”

Nicholas contends that its more efficient catalyst makes Låkril’s process competitive with even the petrochemical route. A plant using Låkril’s catalyst to produce 40,000 t of acrylic acid per year would have cost parity with a propylene-based plant, he says.

With their promising catalyst in hand, Dauenhauer and Nicholas formed Låkril in 2021. Later that year, the start-up won the Consider Corn Challenge, a contest sponsored by the National Corn Growers Association. In 2022, the firm raised money in a preseed funding round led by Iowa Corn. Låkril has also been awarded over $2 million in federally funded research grants from the US Departments of Energy and Agriculture, as well as from the US National Science Foundation.

Earlier this year, Låkril closed a $3.2 million seed funding round, bringing its total funding to approximately $7 million. With that round came a well-connected backer: GC Ventures America, the venture capital arm of the Thai petrochemical giant PTT Global Chemical. PTT owns Allnex, a coating resin maker that uses acrylic resins. PTT also is a 50% shareholder in NatureWorks, a polylactic acid joint venture with Cargill. Låkril aims to pursue a series A financing round in 2026.

Later this year, the company will start up a continuously operating pilot plant in Chicago that will have the capacity to produce 4 kg of acrylic acid per day. In addition to fine-tuning Låkril’s process for scale-up, the plant will provide sample quantities to acrylic acid users. To assist the company as it begins commercialization, it has hired Justin Brown as CEO. Brown is an energy industry veteran, with experience at Honeywell UOP.

Låkril’s long-term vision is to license its technology and provide the catalyst to a third party that would build the first plant, perhaps a demonstration plant that produces 1–10 t per day. If Låkril reaches that stage, it will have succeeded where for decades many larger firms have fallen short.

Peptobiotics founder and CEO Jonathan Bester comes from an oil family; his father and two uncles are in the industry. And at one point, while working at an algae biotechnology start-up, Bester hoped to disrupt the oil industry with environmentally sustainable alternatives.

But when that company pivoted, Bester took matters into his own hands and decided to start his own firm. He wanted to find a green solution to a modern problem; his idea was to replace commonly used antibiotics in animal agriculture with microorganism-derived antimicrobial peptides.

Human pathogens are becoming more resistant to antimicrobials, in part because of the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture to prevent disease and promote growth. But microbes have been at war with one another for resources since the dawn of life on Earth, and they produce their own antimicrobial peptides—peptides Bester thought could be useful in an agricultural setting.

Pursuing that idea meant leaving his home in the UK. “Europe just was not a suitable place to start this kind of company, because the route to market takes so long,” he says. “So I moved to Southeast Asia.”

Bester landed in Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and it was exceptionally difficult to build a new base of operations. He was briefly connected with a cofounder in a collaboration that didn’t end up working out. “I was a little bit lost,” Bester says. “I needed someone who could help me build the technology. And so I asked another entrepreneur . . . who introduced me to a promising PhD student who was just graduating.”

That student was Jhee Hong Koh, now Peptobiotics’ R&D lead. “I spent 5 years of my PhD obsessed over protein production and fat production,” Koh says. “John came to my PhD lab, and I met him in the middle of an experiment.” The two had instant chemistry and joined up after Koh graduated.

In time, Koh helped Bester identify peptides that could kill common agricultural pathogens and engineer a microorganism to produce heaps of the peptides in a fermentation facility. That led to winning Singapore’s Sinergy seed grant (as Vaciome, the company’s name at the time) in 2021, the Slingshot global start-up pitching competition in 2022, and $6.2 million in series A funding from food industry and other investors in 2024.

Peptobiotics has now delivered the first of its peptides to aquaculture facilities across Southeast Asia. In trials, shrimp infected with a pathogen and treated with the peptides had between 3 and 10 times the survival rate of those not treated. In the field, the company’s partners say the peptides compete with or perform better than best-in-class antibiotics, according to Bester.

What remains to be seen is if agricultural pathogens develop resistance to Peptobiotics’ peptides. This shouldn’t matter from a human perspective, as nothing like these peptides is used to treat infections in people, and Bester says he has no plans to develop them into a human medicine down the road.

While Peptobiotics’ lead product came on the market this year, scaling up remains a challenge. “We have this huge sell sheet of people wanting more product, but we’re bottlenecked on supply,” Bester says.

The company is working with contract manufacturers to produce more product, but Koh says that scaling up leads to new synthetic biology challenges. “The biology of running fermentation in a lab is just so different than in a 50-ton, 100-ton, 30-ton bioreactor,” he says. “The challenges to make fermentation for our peptides work requires lots of back and forth, lots of learning from both parties.”

Bester says that most of the world’s fermentation industry is in Asia, particularly China, so there’s expertise and capacity to make large-scale manufacturing possible. But that concentration also means multiple competitors in the region, though Bester says Peptobiotics’ products are the best of the bunch.

If the firm can overcome its manufacturing challenges, Bester could fulfill his vision of a full-fledged, environmentally sustainable business. But that alone won’t mean success. “I don’t think we would survive as a company if we were just pitching sustainability,” Bester says. He thinks customers want the product because it works.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed a new approach for identifying individuals with skin cancer that combines genetic ancestry, lifestyle and social determinants of health using a machine learning model. Their model, more accurate than existing approaches, also helped the researchers better characterize disparities in skin cancer risk and outcomes.

Skin cancer is among the most common cancers in the United States, with more than 9,500 new cases diagnosed every day and approximately two deaths from skin cancer occurring every hour. One important component of reducing the burden of skin cancer is risk prediction, which utilizes technology and patient information to help doctors decide which individuals should be prioritized for cancer screening.

Traditional risk prediction tools, such as risk calculators based on family history, skin type and sun exposure, have historically performed best in people of European ancestry because they are more represented in the data used to develop these models. This leaves significant gaps in early detection for other populations, particularly those with darker skin, who are less likely to be of European ancestry. As a result, skin cancer in people of non-European ancestry is frequently diagnosed at later stages when it is more difficult to treat. As a consequence of later stage detection, people of non-European ancestry also tend to have worse overall outcomes from skin cancer.

To help correct this disparity, the researchers analyzed data from more than 400,000 participants in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, a nationwide initiative aimed at building a diverse database of patient data to inform new, more inclusive studies on a variety of health conditions. By leveraging the participants in the All of Us program, the researchers were able to ensure the data they used had substantial representation from African, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, and mixed-ancestry populations.

Key findings from the study include:

• The new model includes both genetic and non-genetic determinants, including lifestyle choices, socioeconomic variables and medication usage to stratify individuals based on their likelihood of having skin cancer.

  
  
  

• The model achieved 89% accuracy in identifying individuals with skin cancer across all populations, with 90% accuracy for individuals of European ancestry and 81% accuracy for people of non-European ancestry.

• In a subset of participants who had genetic data but were missing data on lifestyle and social determinants of health, the model still retained 87% accuracy.

• Genetic ancestry, especially the proportion of European ancestry, was a strong predictor of risk; individuals of European ancestry were at least 8 times more likely to be diagnosed with skin cancer.

The new model is best framed as a clinical case-finding aid, meaning it can help identify people who should receive full-body skin exams from a dermatologist. This could help enable earlier diagnosis in individuals with darker skin tones, potentially alleviating current disparities in skin cancer outcomes. Additionally, their model may be adaptable to other diseases, paving the way for more equitable, personalized medicine for all. 

The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by Matteo D’Antonio, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, and Kelly A. Frazer, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Frazer is also a member of UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. The research was supported by the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of Health and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The researchers declare no competing interests.

The recent decision of the Upper Tribunal (UT) in Almacantar Centre Point Nominee No.1 Ltd & Anor v Penelope de Valk & Others [2025] UKUT 298 (LC) offers clarity on how courts will interpret the recovery of cladding remediation cost through service charges under the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA 2022).

The Facts

Almacantar Centre Point Nominees No.1 Limited and Almacantar Centre Point Nominee No.2 Limited (Almacantar) are the freehold owners of Centre Point House, 15A St Giles High Street London WC2H 8LW (CPH). Around 1987 a substantial part of CPH, which was constructed in the 1960s, was converted into residential leasehold flats and it currently comprises 36 duplex flats.

CPH has a hardwood timber-framed window façade, which has deteriorated over several years. Almacantar proposed a scheme to address the deterioration of the façade and sought a determination from the First Tier Tribunal (FTT), as to liability for the costs of the proposed works to remedy the defective façade.

The FTT held that the proposed works did fall within the landlord’s repairing obligations, and the leaseholders would be liable under the service charge provision to contribute to the remediation costs. However, the FTT found that several of the leaseholders, who held qualifying leases, were entitled to rely on the “leaseholder protections” under the BSA 2022 and were not required to pay any part of the service charge attributable to “cladding remediation”.

Almacantar appealed the decision.

Upper Tribunal Decision

Relevant Defect

A central issue for the UT was whether paragraph 8 of Schedule 8 of the BSA 2022, which exempts qualifying leaseholders from paying service charges for cladding remediation should be interpreted independently of sections 116 and 122 of the BSA 2022. These sections provide that only certain service charges linked to “relevant defects” are not payable; “relevant defects” would include works carried out in a 30-year period from when the provision came into force, so from 28 June 1992.

The UT held that Paragraph 8 is clear and unambiguous, it protects qualifying leaseholders from payment of the cost of remediation of unsafe cladding. Paragraph 8 was not limited by reference to “relevant defect”, and no additional qualification should be read into it.

The UT held that although other parts of the BSA 2022 provide a structured package of leaseholder protections to the 30-year limit, paragraph 8 operates separately and does not fall within that package of remediation. It was held that Paragraph 8 mitigates against the time-limit in respect of unsafe cladding.

Cladding System or Not?

Almacantar raised a technical argument that the façade of CPH is not separate cladding, which could form part of any “cladding system” under Paragraph 8 of Schedule 8 BSA 2022. They argued that the façade at CPH is not an outer skin, instead it forms the exterior of the building itself. Accordingly, the proposed works would not constitute cladding remediation works.

The UT held that the question of whether a building includes cladding is one of fact. The requirement under Paragraph 8 that cladding remediation involves the “outer wall of an external wall system” does not require two separate systems. It was held that the FTT correctly classified CPH’s cladding as a cladding system.

Meaning of Unsafe

The definition of cladding remediation under Paragraph 8 of Schedule 8 of the BSA 2022 includes the removal or replacement of any part of a cladding system that is “unsafe”. Almacantar argued that the term “unsafe” should be narrowly interpreted to mean inherently unsafe cladding, primarily posing a fire risk and should not cover cladding becoming unsafe over time through degradation or structural decay over time. A broader interpretation, they said would have sweeping consequences, capturing many older buildings, which they claimed Parliament could not have intended.

The UT held that the use of the term “unsafe” is broader than a limitation to fire risk, they agreed with the FTT that unsafe means something more than simply out of repair and encompasses a range of threats to building safety, residents and the public. In this case evidence showed serious degradation at CPH, including loose panels, failing timber and compromised external seals which created a real safety risk.

Qualifying Leases

The status of the leases was initially uncertain, however, the FTT relied on the presumption outlined in paragraph 13 of Schedule 8 BSA 2022 and determined that the leaseholders held “qualifying leases” as defined in section 119 of the BSA 2022. As a result, they were entitled to the protections afforded to qualifying leaseholders. Almacantar argued that the FTT had wrongly made an unqualified factual finding about which leaseholders held qualifying leases, instead of merely applying the presumption. On this point, the UT held that the FTT’s application of the presumption stands.

Almacanter did not take any action to challenge this presumption, such as requesting a “leaseholder deed of certificate” from the tenants in accordance with the Building Safety (Leaseholder Protections) (Information etc) (England) Regulations 2022.

Takeaways

• The UT has confirmed that leaseholder protections under the BSA 2022 stretch further than many expected, meaning cladding remediation costs may be more likely to sit with landlords.
• Paragraph 8 of Schedule 8 BSA 2022 is a clear standalone shield, meaning that qualifying leaseholders cannot be charged for cladding remediation costs irrespective of the defect’s age.
• Early due diligence and legal input are critical. Landlords should review lease terms now, request the “leaseholder deed of certificate” early and challenge qualifying lease status where possible to limit future exposure.
• Permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal has been granted, which will provide landlords with further certainty on the position.