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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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Biopharmas are less focused on local job candidates and are more open to recruiting regardless of location, according to the new BioSpace employment outlook report. Even employers who prefer to hire locally would consider remote hires for some roles.
After a series of deaths in patients taking Sarepta Therapeutics’ gene therapies, doubt has crept into investor sentiments around the long-time Wall Street darling, and patients may soon begin looking elsewhere.
In addition to claiming revenue of $19.3 billion for the fourth quarter, Eli Lilly executives offered a glimpse into their strategy to expand their GLP-1 franchise into the immunology and inflammation space, with trials currently underway in asthma, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly both think the Wegovy pill is doing well, but the American rival sees the successful launch as a harbinger of good news for its own candidate, orforglipron, which is expected to hit the market in the second quarter.
On its fourth quarter earnings call Wednesday, AbbVie CEO Robert Michael called oncology and neuroscience “underappreciated” areas of focus for the pharma.
Novo Nordisk CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar acknowledged the market pressure facing the company’s GLP-1 products but sought to assure investors that Novo has the situation under control.
Amgen believes that it can transcend the expected tradeoff between convenience and efficacy, anticipating that its investigational obesity drug MariTide will continue to provide competitive weight loss even at monthly or longer schedules.
After review, Amgen is certain that Tavneos is effective and has a favorable benefit-risk profile. The company informed the FDA on January 28 that they would not pull the drug.
Instead of joining the increasingly crowded GLP-1 arena, GSK will focus its efforts downstream of obesity—a push currently anchored by its Phase III-ready FGF21 analog efimosfermin alfa for liver fibrosis.
Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts said the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program did not receive congressional backing. The FDA has also not yet made disclosures for eight senior reviewers, according to Auchincloss.