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Growing up witnessing the devastating effects of HIV in her family and community in South Africa pushed Olwam Plaatjie to start using preventive HIV medications three years ago. “Sometimes they’d lose weight, they would get sick and have to go to the clinic, and I didn’t want that for me,” she told The Associated Press. “I’d see the people I live with taking (antiretroviral) pills for HIV every day, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle that life.” The 19-year-old is one of thousands of South Africans who signed up for clinical trials of lenacapavir, a highly effective, twice-yearly injectable prevention drug that addresses the drawbacks of daily oral prevention pills. (Gumede, 6/9)

GSK said Tuesday it would buy the cancer-focused biotech Nuvalent in a deal worth $10.6 billion, as the British firm continues its expansion in oncology. (Joseph, 6/9)

Roche Holding AG agreed to pay Nurix Therapeutics Inc. as much as $2.3 billion for rights to an experimental blood-cancer drug, betting it can help patients whose disease stops responding to existing treatments. Nurix will receive $700 million upfront for bexobrutideg, a pill being developed for certain blood cancers and potentially other immune-system and neurological diseases, Roche said Monday. The firms will share development costs and split US profits equally, and Roche will commercialize the therapy outside the US. (Kinzelmann, 6/8)

The race for No. 3 in obesity drugs just got tougher. At the American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans, market leader Eli Lilly & Co. asserted its dominance with data showing its next-generation shot, retatrutide, can help patients lose 30% of their body weight over about two years. Novo Nordisk A/S, the No. 2, said its new Wegovy obesity pill surpassed 3 million prescriptions. (Muller and Kresge, 6/8)

AstraZeneca’s investigational GLP-1 pill showed promise in mid-stage obesity and diabetes studies, but it may still be too early to determine how it stacks up against oral treatments already on the market. (Chen, 6/8)

Patients taking GLP-1 receptor agonists for obesity had a 41% lower risk of obesity-related cancers as compared with patients treated with diet or exercise, a large propensity-matched cohort study showed. (Bankhead, 6/8)