Tristan Manalac

Tristan Manalac

Senior Staff Writer

Tristan is BioSpace‘s senior staff writer. Based in Metro Manila, Tristan has more than eight years of experience writing about medicine, biotech and science. Being formally trained in molecular biology, he once dreamed of collecting degrees and starting his own lab. But these days, he finds his greatest joy in a bottle of beer and a beautiful sentence. He can be reached at tristan.manalac@biospace.com, tristan@tristanmanalac.com or on LinkedIn.

On Monday, GSK reported that a plaintiff voluntarily dropped her Zantac case against the company and that it is in the process of appealing a Delaware State Court’s decision to admit expert testimony in other cases.
More patients are having to pay out-of-pocket for Eli Lilly’s weight-loss medication Zepbound than they did for type 2 diabetes drug Mounjaro, according to Lilly USA President Patrik Jonsson.
FDA
Ipsen and Genfit’s elafibranor will now be marketed as Iqirvo and is the first new medicine approved in nearly a decade for the treatment of the rare liver disease, according to the companies.
Moderna’s combination vaccine candidate for COVID-19 and influenza outperformed licensed vaccines in older adults, according to late-stage results reported on Monday.
Lilly’s tirzepatide achieved an absence of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis without the worsening of fibrosis in more than 50% of patients in a mid-stage study, the company reported Saturday.
While a prolonged, 15-day regimen of Paxlovid is safe, it appears to be ineffective at lowering the symptoms of long COVID, according to results of a Phase II trial funded by Pfizer and conducted by Stanford Medicine.
FDA
The FDA on Friday approved GSK’s application to use Arexvy to vaccinate adults aged 50 to 59 years who are at increased risk of developing severe respiratory syncytial virus.
The companies announced Friday that their candidate survodutide, which is licensed to Boehringer Ingelheim from Zealand Pharma, improved fibrosis in more than 50% of treated patients with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis.
After rejecting a previous takeover offer from Future Pak, Vanda Pharmaceuticals is now fielding another acquisition proposal from Cycle Pharmaceuticals, which values the biotech at $8 per share.
AbbVie’s antibody-drug conjugate Elahere, developed by ImmunoGen, elicited a nearly 52% objective response rate in heavily pretreated patients with folate receptor-alpha-positive, platinum-sensitive ovarian cancer.
In advance of an advisory committee meeting on Monday, the FDA’s internal reviewers have raised issues regarding Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s disease candidate donanemab, flagging problems with its study design and safety outcomes.
Amgen’s CD19-directed antibody Uplizna in a late-stage study showed it can suppress the risk of flares by nearly 90% in patients with IgG4-related disease, the company announced Wednesday.
Novo Nordisk will face strong generic competition from at least 15 companies in China for its blockbuster GLP-1 receptor agonist products Wegovy and Ozempic, according to Reuters.
Telix Pharmaceuticals is looking to cash in on radiopharmaceuticals, which have emerged as one of the hottest spaces in oncology, with an initial public offering to help support its pipeline of targeted radiation products.
Moderna on Thursday said its investigational mRNA-based therapy for methylmalonic acidemia has been selected for the FDA’s accelerator program for rare diseases, dubbed START.