Johnson & Johnson executive Michael Sneed is leading the pharma’s effort to talk about systemic racism in a new series that debuted this month.
The six-episode series ‘Starting the Conversation’ began with Sneed, who is J&J’s executive vice president and head of global corporate affairs and communications, in his hometown of Chicago.
As ‘one of the most racially segregated cities in the US,’ Black Chicagoan’s life expectancy is nine years lower than non-Black residents, he says in the opening of the nine-minute video. In the first episode, Sneed talks about his plan to travel across the country to talk to Black doctors and nurses on the frontline of healthcare in America’s Black communities. The second episode with Sneed traveling to Baltimore debuted Tuesday.
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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.
Michel Vounatsos, Biogen CEO (Credit: World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico)
In a surprise move, Biogen announced Monday that it will cut the price of its controversial Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm in half, slashing the cost from $56,000 to $28,000.
The sudden discount marks a sudden turnaround for the big biotech as it struggles to turn around a drug whose stuck-in-the-mud sales and political ramifications have sent the company into turmoil and triggered the ousting of its longtime chief scientist. Biogen’s leadership had resisted calls since June to reduce the price of the drug.
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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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Rashad Burgess, head of Gilead Sciences’ HIV community operations
The Covid pandemic set back progress in another pandemic, HIV, to devastating effect. Few likely know that as well as Rashad Burgess, the head of Gilead Sciences’ HIV community operations and overseeing the pharma company’s local ambassadors in cities across the US.
For the first time in 40 years, there were months when more people were dropping out of HIV treatment than enrolling, Burgess said. The prevalence is particularly pronounced in the South, which even before the pandemic accounted for 51% of new HIV diagnoses, according to the CDC – and its only gotten worse in the past 21 months.
Whether you call it the new normal, the next normal or just a major shift, pharma marketing will never be the same thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
From the acceleration of digital strategies and communication to reputation boosts beyond what anyone could have imagined, pharma and biotech marketing is on a permanent new path. And while some of that path is still under construction and will continue for the next several years, experts predict some defined trends for 2022.
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Graphic: Alexander Lefterov for Endpoints News
Drug pricing reform has been a political football for years, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden championing changes during their presidencies. Little has moved the needle on Capitol Hill, however, thanks in part to the drug industry’s powerful lobbyists.
In the most recent example, Democrats tried to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices — an immediate non-starter for biopharma proponents. After months of negotiation, the measure fell apart in favor of provisions on a small subset of drugs that passed the House but marked a far cry from Biden’s promises and what many activists had hoped for. The bill, included as part of Biden’s broad social policy agenda, now appears dead after Democrats failed to secure 50 votes in the Senate.
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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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The director of the gastrointestinal oncology program at the University of Chicago Medical Center has been charged by the US attorney in Chicago with insider trading after he made more than $134,000 from stock trades based on an early look at the results of a Five Prime Therapeutics trial.
The US attorney’s office said yesterday that back in early November 2020, Daniel Catenacci, a University of Chicago associate professor with more than a decade of experience who worked with Five Prime on early trials, purchased more than 8,700 shares of the company the morning before it announced positive results from a Phase II trial in treating advanced gastric/gastroesophageal cancer.
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Right as the new Omicron variant is poised to increase rapidly across the US, the federal government has effectively run out of the only monoclonal antibody treatment that works against it, and at least one major hospital system is now halting all mAb infusions.
Late last month, the federal government paused shipments of GlaxoSmithKline and Vir’s mAb treatment sotrovimab in order to conserve supplies of the only treatment that might work against the Omicron variant. Last week, however, HHS told Endpoints News that the move to hold back sotrovimab was unrelated to Omicron, and due to a surplus of Eli Lilly mAbs, which aren’t effective against Omicron.
https://endpts.com/marketingrx-roundup-j-gsks-trelegy-asthma-ads-amp-awareness/
