TMR

TAKEDA Pharmaceutical Co. rose the most in seven months on Friday after the drugmaker said its oral psoriasis drug zasocitinib proved safe and effective in late-stage trials, marking a milestone in its effort to treat the incurable skin condition.

The stock rose as much as 4.3% in early Tokyo trading, the biggest intraday gain since May 13. 

More than half of patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis saw their condition almost completely disappear and about 30% saw it fully disappear after 16 weeks of treatment compared with a placebo or the existing therapy apremilast, the company said Thursday. 

Takeda plans to submit data to the US Food and Drug Administration and other regulators beginning in fiscal 2026.

“This represents best-in-class data and leaves quite a positive impression,”  Hidemaru Yamaguchi, an equities analyst at Citigroup Global Markets Japan Inc., said in a note to clients. “Expectations for the drug was not particularly high.”

If approved, zasocitinib would join a small but growing group of oral psoriasis treatments — long a market dominated by ointments and injectable antibody therapies — and stand out as one of the first drugs discovered with the help of artificial intelligence. 

Algorithms significantly accelerated the identification of zasocitinib from a vast pool of molecules for testing, according to Jeb Keiper, chief executive officer at Nimbus Therapeutics LLC, which discovered the medicine.

Takeda bought zasocitinib, also known as TAK-279, from Boston-based Nimbus in 2023 for $4 billion upfront plus up to $2 billion in milestone payments. The therapy is part of Takeda’s strategy to cushion an expected sales decline once its blockbuster ulcerative colitis drug Entyvio faces generic competition.    

Citi’s Yamaguchi says the drug will generate annual sales of ¥150 billion ($964 million) at its peak, and per-share value of ¥750. 

The global psoriasis treatment market, valued at $27 billion in 2024, is projected to nearly double to $58 billion by 2032, according to research firm Fortune Business Insights. Psoriasis is a chronic autoimmune disorder that causes rashes marked by itchy, scaly rashes and afflicts more than 125 million people worldwide. –BLOOMBERG

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AUSTRALIA will start a gun buyback program to take surplus, newly-banned and illegal firearms off the street, following the terror attack in Bondi Beach which left 15 people dead.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Friday announced the government will introduce legislation to help fund the buyback. 

“We expect hundreds of thousands of firearms will be collected and destroyed,” he said at a press conference in Canberra, adding that states and territories will collect and process the weapons, while the Australian Federal Police will be responsible for destroying them, under the proposal. 

It will be the biggest such program since the gun buyback held in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, Albanese said. The Federal Government will share costs equally with Australian states and territories.

A father-son duo targeted a Jewish gathering at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi on Sunday, shooting into the crowd, in what authorities have described as an Islamic State-inspired attack on the Jewish community. The father died in the shootout, while the son, identified as 24-year-old Naveed Akram, has been charged with 59 offenses including murder and terrorism.

Albanese is shouldering intense pressure over his handling of a tide of antisemitism over the past two years by pursuing a post-attack agenda of gun control and tougher action on anti-Jewish hate.

Read More: Bondi Confronts Aftermath of Beach Attack as Crime Scene Reopens

National Cabinet earlier in the week agreed to work toward laws to limit the number of firearms to be held by any one individual, limiting open-ended firearms licensing and the types of guns that are legal, making Australian citizenship a condition of holding a firearm license.

New South Wales Parliament is expected to meet on Monday to consider strengthening gun laws in the state. Albanese on Thursday announced the government would also create new laws against hate speech. –BLOOMBERG

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Plastic-related GHG emissions are expected to surge by 58%, to 4.2Gt of CO2 equivalent per year 

by LESLIE KAUFMAN 

DESPITE clear evidence that plastic is clogging oceans and beaches and breaking down into microplastics that enter our bodies, humans are continuing to produce the material at accelerating rates. 

The result: Global plastic pollution will hit 280 million metric tonnes (MT) per year by 2040, or a dump truck’s worth every second. 

That is one of the alarming statistics from Breaking the Plastics Wave 2025, a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts with ICF International. It offers a comprehensive assessment of plastic pollution and its effect on human health and the environment. 

In August, talks to forge an international treaty to rein in plastic pollution collapsed as countries that produce the majority of the material blocked proposals to limit the amount of new plastic created. Meanwhile, recycling rates have remained low. 

Thenewreportisabitofa hybrid. It compiles data from recent research and then runs it through a model to predict outcomes under different policy scenarios. Winnie Lau, director of Pew’s Preventing Ocean Plastics project and one of the authors, said the team “wanted to pull it all together in one integrated analysis to look at impacts across the board.” 

Pew published a similar report in 2020, but it limited the scope then to pollution from consumer-facing plastics like packaging that end up in solid waste systems. This report looks far beyond that to include “hidden” plastics, including those used in the construction, agriculture and transportation sectors. 

If the world continues on the current trajectory, the outlook for 2040 is bleak, the report warns. Global production of new plastic is set to increase by 52%, twice as much as waste-management systems. Plastic-related greenhouse gas emissions are expected to surge by 58%, to 4.2 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 equivalent per year — enough that, if plastic production were a country, it would be the current third-largest emitter. At the root of the problem is the fact that plastics are mostly derived from fossil fuels. 

There are some 16,000 different chemicals in plastics and scientists have identified more than one-fourth of those as possibly harmful 

to human health. In the five years since the last Pew report, a wave of research has attempted to understand in particular how a class of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, widely used in makeup and cookware, may affect digestive, reproductive and cognitive function. 

Pew also modeled the global health impacts associated with the making and disposal of plastic (excluding microplastics) and related pollution. The authors estimate the world’s population will lose 5.6 million total years of healthy life in 2025 and 9.8 million years in 2040. Primary plastic production accounts for the majority of this via links to cancers and respiratory diseases. 

Countries and communities already have tools at their disposal to reduce the manufacture and use of plastics drastically. They could mandate better product and packaging design and invest in infrastructure to support reuse. (Think of how milkmen would once deliver bottles of milk while carting away the used ones for cleaning and refilling.) 

In Pew’s ideal scenario, subsidies for plastic production would be eliminated and waste collection would be greatly expanded. If that happened, nearly 100% of consumer packaging could be collected and recycling rates could double, the authors write. 

But even under perfect conditions, they concede, microplastics would be much harder to control. The main sources of microplastics are vehicle tire dust, paint and agriculture-related products — for example, fertiliser sold in plastic pods that dissolve into soil and plastic sheeting that is used for mulch. There are few straightforward substitutes for these materials. 

Among Pew’s recommendations are decreasing overall plastic production, using safer chemicals and taking targeted actions to reduce the shedding of microplastics. One anti-plastics group welcomed the report. “We need laws that require fewer toxic chemicals in plastic and less plastic production, and we applaud Pew for prioritising those measures,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator. 

However, Enck said the authors were overly optimistic in projecting that plastic recycling would grow substantially with different policies in place. 

“There’s a good reason why the plastics recycling rate has never reached double digits,” she said. “It’s because its chemical and polymer complexity makes large-scale recycling technically and economically infeasible. We’re wasting valuable time by relying on a system that has not worked for decades.” — Bloomberg

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• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition

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TikTok’s long-delayed plan to separate from Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. was put in motion Thursday when the video sharing sensation said it’s being bought by a group of buyers led by Oracle Corp.

TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew told employees that the company and ByteDance signed binding agreements to create a US joint venture majority-owned by American investors, according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg. Chew wrote that he was “pleased to share some great news” and said agreements with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX have been signed. The deal is expected to close on Jan. 22, 2026, though Chew added that “there’s more work to be done” before then.

Upon closing, the US joint venture will operate as an independent entity that will control US data protection, content moderation and algorithm security, Chew told employees in the memo. The new US entity will also be “governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors,” he added. Oracle shares jumped nearly 6% in after-hours trading Thursday. 

The memo outlined a deal that matched what the White House announced in September, which was pending approval from China at the time. Chew’s memo Thursday did not mention China’s opinion on the transaction, which would wrest some — but not total — control of TikTok US from ByteDance. Under the arrangement, 50% of the investors in TikTok US will be new, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based investment company, each retaining 15% ownership; 30.1% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance.

The terms outlined in the CEO’s memo appear to leave the door open for ByteDance to potentially retain oversight of key parts of US TikTok, an app used by half the country. ByteDance’s involvement has long been a sticking point in negotiations, and has led critics, including members of Trump’s own party, to argue that the arrangement the White House negotiated may not pass legal muster. The national security law passed and signed under former President Joe Biden mandated that TikTok US and ByteDance have no operational relationship.

ByteDance’s coveted content algorithms are considered central to TikTok’s business. Under the version of the deal recently outlined by the White House, ByteDance is expected to license its AI recommendation technology to the newly created US TikTok entity, which will use the existing algorithm to retrain a new system on US data that is secured by Oracle, TikTok’s cloud partner. 

Oracle’s role as a data security guard has also raised concerns. The arrangement mirrors an earlier TikTok-Oracle collaboration proposed years ago to the US government as a solve to similar concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership. That team-up, called Project Texas, was ultimately rejected by the US government and deemed insufficient to address national security issues. 

If finalized, the deal will remove a persistent issue in Beijing-Washington relations and signal progress in broader negotiations between the two countries, which have sparred on trade and other issues. 

The White House had dominated disclosures about the proposed arrangement, which was mandated on national security grounds by a law signed last year under the Joe Biden administration. US officials have expressed concern that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and are worried that Beijing could use the app to collect data about US citizens or push specific narratives to Americans via the app’s recommendation algorithm. 

Under the law, the initial deadline for the sell-or-ban rule was this past January, but Trump extended this deadline multiple times since reentering office, most recently pushing it into January 2026. 

For months, as the prospect of a ban under Trump has become less and less likely, TikTok has been operating business as usual and further planting its flag as a dominant cultural force in the US. It has been pushing aggressively into e-commerce and livestream shopping, including partnering with major American tech companies including Amazon.com Inc. The same day that Chew announced an agreement had been reached, TikTok held its first-ever Oscars-style red carpet show, The TikTok Awards, in Los Angeles. –BLOOMBERG

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