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Replimune is axing 144 employees at its Woburn headquarters and 80 at its Framingham manufacturing site. The cuts follow the FDA’s second rejection of the biotech’s advanced melanoma candidate.
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Doubling survival in pancreatic cancer, a long-fought rare disease approval, a massive IPO and ambitious biotech entrepreneurs have BioSpace Senior Editor Annalee Armstrong feeling upbeat about the biotech scene.
After Replimune’s advanced melanoma drug was rejected for a second time, CEO Sushil Patel slammed the FDA for failing to exercise regulatory flexibility, while other experts bemoaned the agency’s lack of consistency. With new safety guidelines for gene editing therapies, the FDA has taken a first step toward fixing both problems.
The Merck update, which will shed light on a $588 million bet to succeed Keytruda, is part of a roster of presentations that could shape the future of ADCs, protein degraders and KRAS-targeted therapies.
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Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy has a few months’ head start on Eli Lilly’s newly approved pill. While the Indianapolis pharma has come from behind the Danish rival in the weight loss space before, last time it clearly had the better drug.
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In a Phase Ib/IIa trial, 91% of patients receiving the highest dose of trontinemab were amyloid negative after seven months of treatment, representing what B. Riley Securities called a “paradigm shift” to first-generation FDA-approved antibodies.
The German giant is looking to develop new drugs for undisclosed eye diseases using Re-Vana’s extended-release injectable platform to supply drugs to the eye for months at a time.
The star of GSK’s Hengrui partnership is the COPD candidate HRS-9821, which will complement the pharma’s respiratory pipeline that’s anchored by the anti-asthma drug Nucala.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to remove all members of the USPSTF for being too “woke,” according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. An HHS spokesperson, however, says no final decision has been made about the panel.
Brazilian authorities said the death was unlikely to have been caused by Elevidys and was instead more in line with severe infection exacerbated by immunosuppression.
Despite the failure of its Recognify-partnered inidascamine, Jefferies analysts do not expect a definitively negative stock impact on atai, given the company’s promising psychedelic pipeline.
Acknowledging the limits of disease-modifying drugs like Leqembi and Kisunla, companies like Bristol Myers Squibb, Acadia, Otsuka and Lundbeck are renewing a decades-old search for symptomatic treatments, including in high-profile drugs like Cobenfy.
These five upcoming data drops could usher in more effective and convenient therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and open up novel pathways of action to treat the memory-robbing illness.
The Commissioner’s National Priority Vouchers aim to offer accelerated pathways to drugs that meet certain criteria, perhaps including a low price-tag. But the policy is vaguely defined and was announced without public input, going against the FDA’s own published practices, experts say.
The collaboration focuses on ‘molecular gates,’ a class of molecules that the startup company Gate Bioscience says can stop pathogenic proteins from leaving the cell.