Drug Development

Sales of Johnson & Johnson’s esketamine-based nasal spray jumped in the fourth quarter last year, priming the pump for a suite of other pharmas, including AbbVie, champing at the bit with their own psychedelics.
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After advancing in lockstep through the pandemic, the fortunes of the biotechs have diverged as their use of COVID-19 windfalls has taken shape.
AstraZeneca’s $15 billion pledge to its China operations highlights the country’s advantages. But other regions are also hoping to host more clinical studies.
With Lykos’ regulatory failure now squarely in the rearview mirror, Compass Pathways and Definium are leading what one analyst suspects will be “a very big year for psychedelics.”
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With several recent approvals in the space and more on the horizon, BioSpace looks at some of the key decisions and their larger significance both for patients and science.
Health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) is a critical but sometimes overlooked part of drug development. Decentralized trials now make it easy.
Brazil’s Ministry of Health and nonprofit Caring Cross announced a collaboration Tuesday aimed at local manufacturing of CAR-T cell and stem cell gene therapies at a much lower cost than Europe and the U.S.
Stoke Therapeutics reported results for Dravet syndrome studies showing clinically meaningful effects, including reductions in convulsive seizure frequency, supporting the potential for disease modification.
The early-stage study showed that Viking Therapeutics’ oral obesity candidate VK2735, a dual agonist of the GLP-1 and GIP receptors, elicited a 3.3% reduction in mean body weight. The company plans to start a Phase II trial.
Axsome clinched a late-stage victory for its chronic sleep disorder candidate AXS-12, which demonstrated significant improvement in cataplexy—the sudden loss of muscle tone while a person is awake—after five weeks.
The National Institutes of Health claims BioNTech is in default regarding alleged royalty payments the agency contends it is owed in connection with the company’s COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty.
Regeneron’s bispecific antibody odronextamab was hit with Complete Response Letters from the FDA noting issues with the enrollment status of its confirmatory trials.
Monday’s announced buyout of Virginia-based Landos Biopharma adds a mid-stage, oral NLRX1 agonist for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease to AbbVie’s growing portfolio.
The regulator has allowed for emergency use of Invivyd’s monoclonal antibody Pemgarda as a COVID-19 pre-exposure prophylaxis for moderately or severely immunocompromised patients.