Start-up funding, the perils of compounding, and neuropsych insights — a BioCentury podcast

BioCentury’s 2025 class of series A companies

2025 marked the end of a four-year slide in series A financings for biotechs, with 144 biotechs raising an aggregate of $8 billion, up $1 billion from the prior two years. On the latest BioCentury This Week podcast, BioCentury’s Danielle Golovin assesses which companies VCs backed last year and what their investments say about where technology is headed.

Washington Editor Steve Usdin offers a perspective on why compounded Wegovy is an assault on the biopharma industry and also explains how the spending bill signed into law last week is a rebuke to proposed White House biomedical cuts.

And Executive Editor Selina Koch unpacks her interview on The BioCentury Show podcast with neuroscientist and Seaport Therapeutics Inc. Chair Steven Paul, noting that while serendipity drives drug discovery in psychiatry, it’s engineering that gets it across the finish line.

Dig deeper into this week’s episode:

• Series A companies: Biotech’s class of 2025
• Serendipity drives discovery in psychiatry, engineering gets it across the line, says Steve Paul
• Compounded Wegovy is more than a scam — it threatens innovation
• Spending law a rebuke to proposed White House biomedical cuts