Topline
Online gambling website Kalshi has already accepted more than $100,000 worth of bets in a new suite of prediction markets launched Thursday that allows people to gamble on the outcome of pharmaceutical clinical trials and when—or if—a drug will be approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
A sign for the Food And Drug Administration.
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Key Facts
Kalshi launched the new markets Thursday in partnership with AppliedXL, which monitors and predicts the outcomes of clinical trials, and people are now able to place bets on more than a dozen different pharmaceutical outcomes.
The market only allows people to bet on the outcomes of Phase 3 trials run by established biopharma companies and on full approval decisions by the FDA—not on early-stage trials or conditional approvals, but it could expand the market down the line.
For now, most of the available bets focus on late-stage trials run by larger companies with market caps of at least $500 million, like Gilead Sciences (one market asks if the FDA will approve Gilead’s experimental cancer drug anito-cel by the end of the year).
Other bets include if an Alzheimer’s drug developed byAriBio will meet the goals of its late-stage clinical trial, when Eli Lilly’s new weight loss drug retatrutide will get FDA approval and if the FDA will approve a cure for Type 1 diabetes before 2033 (56% of bettors say no).
Kalshi requires employment verification for traders and says it will restrict the markets only to people without insider information (a policy that has failed before), but researchers have said they’re still concerned about insider trading and manipulation.
CHIEF CRITICS
Bioethicists, physicians and clinical trial researchers have all raised concerns about allowing people to bet on drug trials and FDA approvals. Researchers told Stat News that financial incentives could encourage people with influence over a study to alter or delay decisions, and could shift the focus away from discovering accurate medical evidence and toward influencing market outcomes. They said it could also influence patients, who may decide to withdraw or stay in a study based on betting odds rather than medical advice. People with privileged knowledge—such as company employees, clinical investigators, doctors or nurses—could use nonpublic information to place profitable bets before results are announced and even if regulators later detect insider trading or market manipulation, the trial itself may already have been compromised.
CONTRA
Kalshi argues the markets will make public pharmaceutical information that is usually kept under lock and key. By creating prediction markets, the company says experts, investors, physicians, scientists and informed observers will be able to collectively translate that information into a single, public probability that anyone can see. Reuters summarized the initiative as making “drug-development odds public for the first time.”
BIG NUMBER
$128,401. That’s the trading volume under Kalshi’s “medicine” market as of about 3 p.m. Thursday.