The Two Sides of Technology
We're just at the beginning of 2026 and the job cuts are starting to stack up. Big companies that spent years hiring aggressively are now doing the opposite — and they’re doing it at scale.
This week alone, Amazon said it will lay off another 16,000 corporate employees, on top of the 14,000 it cut in the fall. That’s roughly 10% of its corporate workforce. UPS says it plans to cut 30,000 jobs this year, after already cutting 48,000 last year. Pinterest plans to shrink its workforce by up to 15%.
It’s not just tech either.
Starbucks has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs at its corporate offices and is now talking openly about hiring fewer people there going forward, while leaning more on technology to get efficient. Nike is cutting hundreds of jobs at distribution centers as it rolls out more advanced automation.
And closer to home, here in Canada, the conversation is starting to sound familiar. The federal government has been openly discussing the need to reduce the size of its workforce, with estimates pointing to tens of thousands of potential job cuts over the coming years as budgets tighten and efficiency becomes a bigger priority.
The pattern isn’t hard to spot.
Companies — and governments — expanded aggressively during the pandemic years. Now they’re pulling back. At the same time, they’re pouring money into AI and automation. Less money going to people. More money going to software.
Some economists think we’re only at the beginning of this. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that AI was already responsible for thousands of job losses each month in 2025, and they expect that number to rise in 2026. Over time, they believe AI could replace a meaningful share of today’s jobs, even if it also creates new ones along the way.
One thing is becoming clear. Organizations that figure out how to use AI well are starting to see the payoff.
Sometimes that shows up as higher productivity. Other times it shows up as fewer people needed to do the same work.
One sector that stands to benefit enormously from this shift is biotech.
Drug discovery has always been slow, expensive, and uncertain. AI changes that math. It helps researchers sift through massive datasets faster, design better molecules, run smarter experiments, and decide earlier what’s worth pursuing — and what isn’t. Fewer dead ends. Less wasted time. Lower costs.
It doesn’t guarantee success. But it helps companies figure out faster what works and what doesn’t.
This month, I’m adding another name to my biotech basket and walking through why I’m comfortable owning it patiently.
The Disease That Builds in Silence
Most modern diseases don’t arrive suddenly. They build quietly, year after year, often without symptoms, until something finally breaks.
Fatty liver disease is one of those conditions.
It doesn’t begin as a crisis. It begins with excess energy — extra calories, extra fat — accumulating inside the liver. Over time, that fat triggers inflammation. As the liver is injured again and again, it begins to scar.
Today, fatty liver disease affects tens of millions of people worldwide, closely tracking the rise in obesity and metabolic dysfunction. It’s no longer rare. It’s becoming routine.
Yet despite all the attention on metabolic health and weight-loss drugs, the most dangerous part of this disease remains difficult to treat.
That part is liver scarring.
Why Scarring Changes Everything
Liver scarring is known as fibrosis.
When the liver is injured repeatedly, it tries to repair itself. At first, that helps. Over time, though, healthy tissue is replaced with stiff scar tissue that doesn’t work the same way.
Fibrosis usually develops quietly. Early on, most people feel fine. There’s often no pain. Blood tests can look normal. As scarring worsens, fatigue can become persistent. A feeling of pressure in the abdomen can appear. Swelling can develop in the legs or belly. In later stages, thinking can feel slower or foggier.
In advanced cases, fibrosis can progress to cirrhosis. At that point, scar tissue interferes with blood flow through the liver, and the organ begins to struggle. Options narrow quickly.
This is why fibrosis matters. It’s not the most obvious part of fatty liver disease, but it’s the part that tends to decide how things end.
How the Disease Is Treated Today
Most current treatments focus on reducing the stress placed on the liver rather than directly addressing scarring itself.
Doctors usually talk about weight loss, blood sugar control, cholesterol, and managing related metabolic conditions. New weight-loss and metabolic drugs have helped many people lose weight and improve their overall health.
They’ve also been huge commercial successes, which tells you something important: the demand for metabolic solutions is real and growing.
But there’s a catch.
Reducing fat doesn’t automatically remove scar tissue that’s already there. Fibrosis builds over years, and once it’s established, the body has a hard time undoing it.
So while medicine has gotten better at slowing new damage, it still struggles to deal with damage that’s already done.
That gap — between managing the disease and healing the liver — is where the opportunity sits.
A Company Working on a Different Angle
Sagimet Biosciences (NASDAQ: SGMT) is a small company working on a more direct solution to fatty liver disease — not by managing the consequences after damage has already occurred, but by acting earlier in the disease process itself.
Sagimet starts from a simple idea: liver damage doesn’t happen all at once. It builds slowly after years of excess fat being produced inside the liver, leading to repeated inflammation and injury. If that process can be slowed earlier, the damage that comes later may be less severe.
Instead of focusing only on helping the liver deal with fat that’s already there, Sagimet is working on a therapy meant to reduce how much excess fat the liver produces in the first place. Less constant stress may mean fewer repeated injuries over time.
This isn’t meant to replace weight-loss or metabolic drugs. It’s meant to sit alongside them.
In diseases like this, the treatments that end up mattering most are often the ones that quietly become part of the routine — used together with other drugs because they address something others don’t.
That’s what Sagimet is trying to become.
Where Sagimet Is in the Biotech Journey
Before talking about where Sagimet stands, it helps to quickly explain how the biotech journey usually works.
Most drugs start in the lab, where they’re tested in cells and animals. That’s called the preclinical stage. If something looks promising and safe enough, it moves into clinical testing — which simply means testing the drug in people.
Clinical testing happens in phases.
A company is considered clinical-stage if its drug is being tested in people but isn’t approved or sold yet.
That’s where Sagimet Biosciences sits today.
Sagimet’s lead drug, denifanstat, has already moved past the earliest and most speculative part of this process. It has gone through mid-stage clinical trials and shown that it does what it’s designed to do in patients. Most importantly, it has shown signs of improving liver scarring — the damage that builds up over time and causes the most serious problems in fatty liver disease.
In biotech, progress is earned through evidence. The data Sagimet has produced so far could allow its drug to move into the next phase of development, where trials get larger and the questions become more demanding.
From here, the path still takes time. Larger trials, regulatory review, and more data are needed before any commercial launch becomes realistic. Meaningful revenue, if it comes, is likely still several years away.
That doesn’t mean the stock has to sit still until approval. Biotech stocks often move on data, expectations, and shifts in sentiment well before a drug reaches the market. Sagimet itself traded as high as around $10 last July, just six months ago, showing how quickly perception can change as new information comes in.
💰 The Financial Story So Far
Sagimet first came onto my radar through a biotech newsletter I read regularly — one that’s helped me spot a few good ideas in the past.
When I look at Sagimet’s financials, what stands out isn’t income. It’s breathing room.
The company has roughly $120–130 million in cash and no long-term debt. That matters. Debt can force bad decisions, especially in biotech. Sagimet doesn’t have that pressure right now.
Cash burn has been reasonable for where the company is, roughly $12–14 million per quarter. At that pace, Sagimet has time — not weeks or months, but years — to keep moving its programs forward.
That time matters. It allows management to run trials without rushing, to wait for better moments to raise capital if needed, and to avoid doing anything desperate.
Sagimet will need more money eventually if it moves into large late-stage trials. That’s normal. But today, the company isn’t scrambling. It’s moving at its own pace.
Why Sagimet Earns a Place in the Biotech Basket
For me, this is where Sagimet goes from interesting to hard to ignore.
The main focus for me is still fatty liver disease. That’s the core problem, and that’s where most of the long-term value would come from if things work out. But there’s also a bonus here that I didn’t fully appreciate at first.
The same drug Sagimet is developing for fatty liver disease — denifanstat — can also be used to treat moderate to severe acne. That might sound unrelated, but it’s grounded in the same biology. Acne is driven by excess oil production and inflammation, which ties back to the same fat-production pathways involved in metabolic disease.
Because of that overlap, Sagimet Biosciences licensed the rights to denifanstat for acne in Greater China to a local partner, Ascletis Pharma. Ascletis is responsible for running the trials, handling regulatory filings, and eventually commercializing the drug in that market.
That partnership just delivered some meaningful news.
Last week, Ascletis announced very positive results from its Phase III acne trials using denifanstat. The drug was shown to be safe, well tolerated, and effective, meeting all of the study’s endpoints. Chinese regulators have also accepted the New Drug Application for acne.
This doesn’t suddenly turn Sagimet into a revenue story. And it doesn’t change the fact that this is still a long-term biotech bet. But it does matter.
It shows that the same drug works in a completely different disease, in late-stage trials, with the cost and execution handled by a partner. It adds a second path for things to go right without Sagimet having to build everything itself.
Finally, I’m comfortable with the financial footing. Sagimet has time. It isn’t being forced to rush decisions or raise capital under pressure. That matters more than most people realize.
For now, I’m adding Sagimet Biosciences to the biotech basket at current prices. This is a small position and one I’m planning to hold for the long term. I’m not trying to rush it or predict every step along the way — I just want to give the story time and see how it develops.