Five years after little Leo Pharma put up its dukes and $115 million in cash to acquire and advance tralokinumab for atopic dermatitis, the Danish biotech has crossed the regulatory finish lines with a year-end approval at the FDA.
The drug will be sold as Adbry and there’s no immediate word on pricing.
This is the 50th new drug approval from CDER this year, totting up to 60 for the year if you add 10 major biologic OKs to the mix. That marks a record number of new approvals from the agency, tipping the scales after hitting 59 in 2020 and 2018. And it’s an indication that despite a long litany of setbacks in CMC in other areas, the drumbeat of new approvals continues at chart-topping levels after the long and disastrous dry spell of the early 2000s — despite a global pandemic.
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Matthew Gantz, Castle Creek CEO
Close to 6 months after it initially posted its S-1 in what was still a thriving biotech IPO market, Castle Creek Biosciences has now yanked the offering as new deals fade against the background of a hard, year-end appraisal for drug stocks.
In its filing with the SEC, Castle Creek CEO Matthew Gantz merely states that the biotech is no longer pursuing an IPO. He had initially penciled in a $100 million raise last summer.
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BridgeBio CEO Neil Kumar had all but reserved the champagne to celebrate the success of its big Phase III study for acoramidis, designed to stabilize transthyretin and slow or halt the progression of TTR amyloidosis. They had bought out full rights to the drug in late 2020 and borrowed the first $450 million of a $750 million loan, adding to a hefty debt load while confidently predicting a straight march to the FDA in 2022.
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The FDA on Thursday authorized another new pill to treat the Omicron variant, this time from Merck.
While Pfizer’s antiviral may prove to be more effective, and Merck’s pill has left some scientists questioning the dangers behind its mechanism of action, molnupiravir will be another weapon in the armamentarium of Covid-19 treatments for the US in a time of need, as two mAb treatments from Regeneron and Eli Lilly are no longer effective against Omicron, and as supplies of a third mAb from Vir/GlaxoSmithKline are very limited.
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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It’s time for our holiday break here at Endpoints News, and like a lot of you, we’ve been prepping for 2022.
Anyone who’s spent some time in industry can tell you the past decade has shoved the drug-hunting field into the forefront of the world’s view of things, garnering tens of billions in investment as new technologies look to change the landscape of R&D. And anyone who qualifies for first-in-class and best-in-class can clean up.
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In the nearly 20 years since it spun out of Stanford, Sutro Biopharma’s greatest financial success has been the other company that uses its underlying technology.
In 2013, three biotech executives licensed Sutro’s protein-synthesis platform to design conjugate vacccines like the kinds used in pneumococcal shots. Now known as VaxCyte, it’s valued at $1.2 billion on Nasdaq — or, roughly speaking, twice what Sutro’s worth on the same exchange.
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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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Angie You and Volker Schellenberger, Amunix
Sanofi is crashing the year-end M&A party with a deal of its own.
Immuno-oncology is the name of the game as it swallows Mountain View, CA-based Amunix for $1 billion upfront and up to $225 million in biobucks, tagging a suite of T cell engagers and cytokine therapies as well as a tech platform for making ‘conditionally activated biologics.’
‘The Amunix technology platform utilizes a next generation smart biologics approach to precisely tailor-deliver medicines to become active only in tumor tissues while sparing normal tissues,’ said Sanofi R&D chief John Reed, ‘thus bringing the promise of more effective and safer treatment options for cancer patients.’
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https://endpts.com/hitting-a-new-record-on-drug-approvals-the-fda-offers-a-thumbs-up-to-another-atopic-dermatitis-contender/
