Digital savvy doctors today want more science-based conversations and online education, annual survey finds.
Physicians want both less and more from pharma companies – less promotional content but also more relevant and scientific information. And they’d rather dial into a webinar to get that information than have a sales reps stop by the office.
Those are a few of the findings from Indegene’s annual global survey of healthcare professionals about pharma companies, and some of the ones that concern Guarev Kapoor, the healthtech company’s head of co-commercialization.
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Their Staying Power Lies in their Patient-Centricity
Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) were traditionally utilized in an isolated fashion prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. To continue their research within the constraints of the pandemic, sponsors and clinical investigators pivoted to a decentralized model out of necessity. At the onset, regulatory agencies offered some guidance on the digital approaches that are acceptable to ensure DCT approaches are applied in a way that maintains patient safety, as well as data quality and integrity.
A district court in Texas will likely tie up the FDA’s FOIA office for months, as the court ruled late Thursday that the agency must release all documents related to its review of Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine.
The order from district judge Mark Pittman, handed down late Thursday, notes that while the Court recognizes the ‘unduly burdensome’ challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA, there also ‘may not be’ a more important issue at the FDA right now than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, and making sure to the American public that the process was not rushed.
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Exscientia CEO Andrew Hopkins and Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson
Drug R&D has for years had an abysmal track record of success, with the vast majority of drug candidates never making it to market. The promise of AI to shorten the discovery time for new drugs and up their chances of success has more big drugmakers buying in — and Sanofi is the latest.
Sanofi will pay $100 million upfront with a potential $5.2 billion in downstream milestones for access to up to 15 small molecule drugs from Exscientia, a red-hot UK deep learning company at the forefront of the so-called ‘AI-discovered’ drug R&D movement, the partners said Friday.
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Scott Clarke, Ambagon Therapeutics CEO
The saying goes necessity is the mother of invention — and few areas of drug development are in greater need than oncology. A new startup is now repurposing promising technology to tackle the hardest-to-drug proteins, and a suite of big-name backers are buying in.
Ambagon Therapeutics launched Friday with an $85 million A round and a world-class group of researcher-founders building what are known as ‘molecular glues’ to crack the code on a class of elusive cellular proteins, the biotech said.
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New year, same Fujifilm Diosynth.
The CDMO giant hit the ground running at full speed this year, announcing it will expand its BioProcess Innovation Center in Research Triangle Park, NC. The move will double its existing laboratory footprint in the Tar Heel State, and add another 145 skilled jobs to the site by 2024. Another 89,000 square feet will be added, which will allow for a more robust commercial process.
Aligos Therapeutics took a beating Thursday after reporting it is stopping development on its lead program for chronic hepatitis B.
The biotech’s shares $ALGS closed down 57% and fell into penny stock territory Thursday, following a morning press release saying Aligos’ ALG-010133 program did not prove efficacious at the dose tested in a Phase I study. Additionally, the company concluded that higher doses were also unlikely to be effective, and ultimately decided to axe the candidate altogether.
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Roger Perlmutter, Eikon CEO
Roger Perlmutter hasn’t wasted any time since announcing his supposed retirement from Merck in October 2020. After leaving his perch as one of the most successful R&D chiefs in Big Pharma, he’s now snatching a cool half-billion dollars to develop ‘a battery of innovative tools’ for drug discovery at the young startup Eikon Therapeutics.
Eikon closed on a $517.8 million Series B round on Thursday morning, bringing the Hayward, CA-based company’s total raise to more than $668 million.
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Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, has become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest advocates for new forms of funding and conducting science (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED)
It’s big days for biology.
The pandemic has seen a series of very public scientific breakthroughs: mRNA vaccine, Covid antibodies, CRISPR as therapy. The minds behind these advancements have graced magazine covers and received prestigious awards.
But the last two years have also, far more quietly, seen a series of new experiments in how to fund the next generation of scientific breakthroughs.
Since March 2020, investors, academics, a significant number of Silicon Valley types, at least one Russian billionaire and two crypto billionaires and, most recently, a few West Coast universities have launched a series of grant programs, institutes, NGOs and companies hoping to change how life science research is done. Though unaffiliated and varying greatly in both size and form, they have broadly promised to evade bureaucracy and misaligned incentives and advance both basic and not-so-basic research in ways they say can’t be done in either conventional academia or profit-focused biotech.
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Eric Easom, CEO of AN2 Therapeutics
After starting up with a $12 million Series A in 2019, California outfit AN2 Therapeutics issued its first press release in over 2 years — and its second ever: The ultra-quiet biotech has raised an $80 million Series B and added a pair of directors to boot.
The biotech is headed by several leaders from Anacor, which was bought out by Pfizer in 2016 for about $5.2 billion. Eric Easom, former head of Anacor’s R&D on neglected diseases, is co-founder and CEO. Other Anacor vets include AN2’s chief development officer, CFO and head of biology.
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