Common performs onstage, December 2020 (Getty Images)
Healthcare screenings and clinical trial enrollment were battered by the pandemic. But the well-known celebrity-backed Stand Up To Cancer non-profit, along with pharma and advocacy partners, has been working to reverse that and make up lost ground, by stepping up awareness campaigns.
Twelve campaigns launched in 2020 and another five in 2021 amplify the need for cancer screening and care, especially for underserved communities. While pharma companies have long been donors to the cancer research group, Covid brought new support — and increased awareness efforts.
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While oncology researchers have long pursued the potential of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, it was unclear whether these therapies would ever reach patients due to the complexity of manufacturing and costs of development. Fortunately, the recent successful development and regulatory approval of chimeric antigen receptor-engineered T (CAR-T) cells have demonstrated the significant benefit of these therapies to patients.
Merck’s new antiviral molnupiravir (Quality Stock Arts / Shutterstock)
After South African scientists reported a new Covid-19 variant — dubbed Omicron by the WHO — scientists became concerned about how effective vaccines and monoclonal antibodies might be against it, which has more than 30 mutations in the spike protein.
‘I think it is super worrisome,’ Dartmouth professor and Adagio co-founder and CEO Tillman Gerngross told Endpoints News this weekend. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel echoed similar concerns, telling the Financial Times that experts warned him, ‘This is not going to be good.’
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The former CFO of Immunomedics, who helped steer the company to its $21 billion buyout by Gilead last year, has been charged with insider trading, the Department of Justice announced Thursday.
Usama Malik tipped off his then-girlfriend and four others that a Phase III study for Trodelvy would be stopped early four days before Immunomedics publicly announced the result in April 2020, DoJ alleged in its complaint. The individuals then purchased Immunomedics shares, selling them after the news broke and Immunomedics’ stock price doubled.
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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Wednesday rejected Moderna’s attempt to overturn key patents related to the delivery vehicle for its Covid-19 vaccine after the biotech sought to preempt a potentially risky infringement lawsuit.
For years, Moderna has been battling a tiny Pennsylvania biotech known as Arbutus over patents for a technology required to deliver its mRNA drugs and vaccines, known as lipid nanoparticles or LNP. Moderna is concerned there’s a substantial risk that Arbutus will assert the ‘069 patent in an infringement suit targeting Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, particularly as Arbutus has boasted of its patent protection and refused to grant a covenant not to sue Moderna.
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Amgen will soon be the 10th biopharma company to pull back on offering drug discounts to contract pharmacies of safety-net hospitals under a federal program. Like its peers, Amgen argues that the growth of these contract pharmacies has ballooned in recent years and needs to be reigned in.
Beginning Jan. 3, 2022, Amgen’s policy will only allow 340B covered hospitals to designate a single pharmacy location, with the exception of federal grantees and contract pharmacies wholly owned by a 340B hospital, or that have common ownership with a health system.
A press release referred to it as simply, ‘the incident.’ But a fire at an Olainfarm site in Latvia last week has left one person dead, and injured another, the company announced Monday.
Just before midnight Nov. 26, a fire broke out in the production building of JSC Olainfarm, as the result of an ‘accident,’ a company spokesperson said in an email to Endpoints News. The two victims were both company employees, and the causes of the accident are still being determined.
Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies is in the middle of a monumental point in the company’s 10-year history, and the CDMO is about to grow even more, as it sets out to be the ‘beating heart’ of the UK’s North East Life Sciences ecosystem.
A site in Billingham, Teeside, UK will receive a $453.72 million investment package from the manufacturer to double the existing footprint and create the largest multi-modal biopharmaceutical manufacturing site in the UK, bringing another 350 jobs to the region by late 2023.
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Vas Narasimhan, Novartis CEO (Thibault Camus/Pool via AP Images)
Thursday marks Novartis’ annual R&D day, and with it comes CEO Vas Narasimhan’s attempt to spotlight the company’s pipeline strategy and emerging stars.
The biggest question entering Thursday’s presentation dealt with how the big biopharma will make up revenues from upcoming generic competition — Novartis says within the next five years, generics will eat away roughly $9 billion in sales. To offset this, Narasimhan outlined a strategy for 4% growth or higher until 2026, focusing on six key medicines he believes will see multibillion dollar profits during this time.
Radek Spisek, Sotio CEO (Cellestia)
In the rather insular world of biotech, most innovation inevitably comes from a cluster of R&D hubs — Cambridge, San Francisco, etc. But sometimes success stories sprout from rocky soil, which is most certainly the case with Prague-based Sotio Biotech and its suddenly jam-packed pipeline of cancer drugs.
After years in quiet development, Sotio now has $315 million in new funds to play with from parent company PPF Group, an investment group founded in the Czech Republic, as the biotech looks to advance its growing pipeline through early- and mid-stage trials.
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