News
Biogen’s new data, presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, supports a tau-focused approach to the intractable neurodegenerative disease; psychedelics are back in the news with more positive data from Compass Pathways and final guidance from the FDA; and the ATTR-CM space got a major shakeup with the late-stage failure of AstraZeneca and Ionis’ antisense therapeutic.
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Biopharma is entering its second-quarter earnings season riding high on a wave of massive deals and venture capital flow, plus a clearing of regulatory and policy overhangs. What can industry watchers expect to hear on the upcoming investor calls?
Biogen touted an “unprecedented” drop in tau in a Phase 2 trial, backing the company’s decision to take diranersen to Phase 3 despite a missed primary endpoint and seemingly supporting the anti-tau approach.
As antibody-drug conjugates advance and move into earlier lines of treatment, drug developers have to build gentler therapies that don’t just extend survival but improve it.
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Congressional letters sent to the CEOs of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, BMS and AbbVie this week voicing concerns about the pharmas’ clinical trials in China highlight an ongoing discrepancy in how government and industry think about the rise of the Asian country’s biotech industry.
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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.
The European Union’s health regulatory agency did not endorse approving Elevidys for ambulatory patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
The strategic reprioritization comes after the company hit two major hurdles in the past year, including a clinical hold for an investigational gene therapy and an FDA rejection for its lead asset.