Novartis is plopping down $150 million in cash to pick up an experimental Parkinson’s drug and grab an option to another, a move that puts it on an increasingly popular path in the field’s search for disease-modifying therapies.
Belgium’s UCB is its partner of choice, supplying two small molecule alpha-synuclein misfolding inhibitors in a deal that can add up to nearly $1.5 billion.
Out of the pair, UCB0599 is already in Phase II trials, making Novartis confident enough to pull the trigger on co-development and commercialization, including to foot half of the R&D bill. The pharma giant will make a decision on UCB7853 once UCB wraps the ongoing Phase I program.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,400+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
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.
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.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,400+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
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.
When GlaxoSmithKline trumpeted its return to neuroscience with a $700 million upfront deal with Alector this summer, it touted its early investments in functional genomics as a key guidepost for that deal. Now, the drug giant has partnered up with Oxford to hopefully add jet fuel to its hunt for breakthroughs in the brain.
GSK and Oxford have kickstarted a five-year collaboration aimed at spurring R&D breakthroughs across a range of hard-to-treat diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s through the use of genomic testing and machine learning, the partners said Wednesday.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,400+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
Sonny Hsiao, Acepodia CEO
Acepodia chairman and co-founder Patrick Yang called cancer ‘the longest war America (has) ever fought.’ So when he met Sonny Hsiao in 2016 and saw his ‘clever, very simple, elegant’ approach to battling tumor cells, he was all in.
Four years and some very early positive results later, Yang and Hsiao have racked up another $109 million from investors to see their ‘antibody-cell conjugates’ through the clinic. And while Yang says this isn’t a crossover round, he admitted that the company is ‘watching the capital climate’ and could possibly file for an IPO next year.
An inmate in Georgia has been sentenced to seven additional years in prison for running a $3 million fraud scheme to steal and then resell heavy equipment from behind bars — by posing as an AbbVie employee using a contraband cell phone.
While serving a 20-year sentence for racketeering and assaulting a police officer, Damon Thomas Young was found to have given himself the fake identity of a purchasing officer with AbbVie named Morgan Sylvia and, beginning in 2019, placed orders for more than $2.8 million worth of heavy construction equipment.
On the hunt for a better AAV capsid for gene therapy, Eric Kelsic’s Dyno Therapeutics has set itself apart with its focus on machine learning to help speed discovery. Now, Japanese drugmaker Astellas — fresh off a slate of gene therapy burns — is taking a bet on Dyno as it looks to the future.
Astellas and Dyno will work together as part of an R&D pact to develop next-gen AAV vectors for gene therapy using Dyno’s CapsidMap platform directed at skeletal and cardiac muscle, the companies said Wednesday. Under the terms of the deal, Dyno will design AAV capsids for gene therapy, while Astellas will be responsible for conducting preclinical, clinical and commercialization activities for gene therapy product candidates using the capsids.
John Maraganore (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
After almost two decades of primarily being known as Alnylam’s CEO, John Maraganore is getting a new, prominent title.
Maraganore is among a slate of new venture partners at ARCH Venture, joining alongside ex-FDA official Luciana Borio, Jake Bauer (previously at MyoKardia), Axel Bouchon (former head of Leaps by Bayer) and Sabah Oney (of Alector fame).
The move was hardly surprising. Maraganore has made it clear that his retirement, which is scheduled for the end of the year, signaled a shift into a new phase of his career where, instead of hands-on parenting, he wanted to be like a ‘grandfather’ to the next generation of biotech startups, imparting hard-earned wisdom about the treacherous journey from the lab to market — one he personally shepherded Alnylam and its RNAi science through.
Fyodor Urnov (L) and Charlie Gersbach
A little under 20 years ago, Charlie Gersbach decided he needed to try something else.
The young Georgia Tech grad student started out his career hoping to help patients regenerate injured tissues, but he found pretty much nothing worked. None of the chemical or mechanical or even electric interventions then in vogue yielded much success.
So he turned his attention to an emerging approach: changing the epigenome, or the systems of tags and folds on DNA that govern which genes are expressed and how. And he stuck to it, even as many scientists, enticed by CRISPR and other advances, flocked to genome editing.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,400+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
https://endpts.com/watch-out-roche-novartis-inks-1-5b-deal-to-chase-down-prominent-parkinsons-target/
