Bob Baloh, Novartis Head of Neuroscience at NIBR (via Cedars-Sinai)
Even after agreeing to sell off $20 billion in shares back to Roche in November, Novartis got a bit more from its crosstown rival — successfully getting ahold of Roche’s head of neuro and rare disease R&D for themselves.
NIBR president Jay Bradner — a well-known name here at Endpoints — announced Bob Baloh’s appointment on Twitter. Baloh will be running NIBR’s neuroscience division.
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CALQUENCE is a registered trademark of the AstraZeneca group of companies.
At the 2021 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, blood cancer researchers from around the world gathered virtually to discuss the progress that has been made in the field of hematology. Over the past decade, that progress has been tremendous. We’ve seen not only breakthrough approaches to care, but also significant improvement upon existing novel treatments and exploring combinations within those medicines.1 These advances have transformed expectations of what a blood cancer diagnosis now means for patients. While we’ve come a long way, I believe the most exciting scientific discovery is yet to come, and that future advances will truly transform patient care.
Khurem Farooq, Gyroscope CEO
Christmas is coming early for Gyroscope.
In its latest gene therapy gambit, Novartis is paying $800 million upfront to acquire the Syncona-backed biotech, with another $700 million reserved for milestones.
Novartis has been diving deep into retinal disorders, and Gyroscope’s lead candidate adds a potential one-time treatment for geographic atrophy — a leading cause of blindness — to the pipeline.
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Vas Narasimhan, Novartis CEO (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The centerpiece of Novartis’s $9.7 billion buyout of the Medicines Company can finally go to market.
Branded Leqvio, the small interfering RNA therapy long known as inclisiran is the first and only FDA-approved treatment to reduce LDL-C, i.e. bad cholesterol, with just two maintenance doses a year after an initial dose and another one at three months.
Touting a ‘revolutionary approach,’ Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan noted that the approval ‘creates new possibilities for how healthcare systems can impact cardiovascular disease, a defining public health challenge of our time.’ The label covers both atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia.
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Alzheimer’s disease researchers along with medical professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins issued a formal statement Monday asking the FDA to quickly pull Biogen’s Aduhelm from the market.
‘An accelerated withdrawal would mitigate some of the harm of its unwarranted accelerated approval,’ they wrote to FDA, explaining how Aduhelm ‘did not meet the FDA’s own criteria for accelerated approval based on surrogate markers because amyloid plaque does not correlate well with symptoms, severity of disease or progression.’
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A little over a week after French regulators decided against authorizing Merck’s Covid-19 antiviral pill, the country has canceled its order, according to multiple reports.
A Merck spokesperson told Reuters that France’s planned purchase didn’t take place after the country’s health authority rejected the pill over growing concerns about efficacy and the impact of the Omicron variant. The country had pre-ordered enough doses to treat 50,000 patients.
Deck the halls with more appointments in the last Peer Review for 2021. Thanks for reading every week!
→ When the calendar flips to 2022, Joan Shen is out at I-Mab ‘to pursue other interests,’ leaving founder and chairman Jingwu Zang to succeed her as acting CEO in a bit of a surprise. Under Shen’s leadership, I-Mab formed a CD47 alliance with AbbVie in September 2020 with lemzoparlimab as the centerpiece, and a year later our Amber Tong detailed I-Mab’s aspirations for other comparable partnerships, notably for development of the CD73 antibody uliledlimab. Shen was one of our 20 Women in Biopharma R&D honorees this month.
Michael Yang, ViaCyte CEO
Over the last 20 years, ViaCyte — under one name or another — has pursued one of the most audacious goals in biotech: a cure for type 1 diabetes.
The company’s plan was to take lab-grown stem cells and turn them into the insulin-producing cells that are destroyed in T1D patients. The first attempt to implant these cells into patients in 2014 failed entirely. But the San Diego biotech regrouped and launched trials for a new candidate in 2017, raising $80 million in the process.
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Harvard University professor Charles Lieber leaves federal court, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021, in Boston (Michael Dwyer/AP Images)
In a stunning climax to an eye-catching saga, Harvard scientist Charles Lieber has been convicted of lying to the federal government about his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program.
Following close to three hours of deliberation, a federal jury in Boston found 62-year-old Lieber — a pioneer in medical nanotechnology and the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department — guilty of all six felony charges, including two counts of making false statements, two counts of filing false tax returns and two counts of failing to disclose a foreign (in this case Chinese) bank account.
David Ricks, Eli Lilly CEO (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Just 6 days after Eli Lilly execs ID’d its $1.1 billion atopic dermatitis drug lebrikizumab as one of its top late-stage drug candidates, the pharma giant has followed up with another round of positive late-stage data as it paves the way to planned regulatory filings in 2022.
The Christmas week statement from Lilly included little by way of hard data — the big outfit typically reserves that for its science conferences — but researchers touted a clean sweep of the primary and all secondaries in its 3rd round of late-stage results.
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https://endpts.com/novartis-taps-roches-neuro-and-rare-disease-rd-lead-to-run-neuroscience-research/
