Two big pharma firms placed high offers on Dec. 26 to acquire companies focused on radiopharmaceuticals and cell therapies in what Evercore ISI analysts are calling a “good sign for the end of the year.”
A new self-injectable therapy for polyneuropathy of hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis (hATTR-PN) will be available in January 2024 now that the U.S. FDA has approved Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Wainua (eplontersen), a ligand-conjugated antisense oligonucleotide.
JCR Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. has signed a research collaboration, option and license agreement with Alexion, Astrazeneca Rare Disease, part of Astrazeneca plc, for the development of novel oligonucleotide therapeutics with targeted delivery to certain tissues or organs using J-Brain Cargo, JCR’s proprietary blood-brain barrier-penetrating technology.
Astrazeneca Korea Co. Ltd. will pull its blockbuster diabetes drug, Forxiga (dapagliflozin), from the South Korean market, a company official confirmed to BioWorld, citing “multiple factors” like increasing local competition and continuing price cuts after patent expiry in 2023.
Compugen Ltd. has entered another collaboration, this time exclusively licensing a preclinical antibody program against an IL-18 binding protein with Gilead Sciences Inc. Compugen will handle ongoing preclinical development and a phase I study of COM-503 to treat tumors, then Gilead receives to sole right to further continue developing the asset. Compugen is getting an up-front $60 million and is eligible for a $30 million milestone payment should the IND clear in 2024. Compugen also is eligible for $758 million in development, regulatory and commercial milestones, putting the deal value at $848 million.
Astrazeneca Korea Co. Ltd. will pull its blockbuster diabetes drug, Forxiga (dapagliflozin), from the South Korean market, a company official confirmed to BioWorld, citing “multiple factors” like increasing local competition and continuing price cuts after patent expiry in 2023.
Astrazeneca plc, which seemed to have backed away from vaccine development after the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly took a shine to Icosavax Inc.’s virus-like particle technology and signed a deal to take over the firm for as much as $1.1 billion.
As South Korea awaits potential changes to drug pricing policies for generics and novel ultra-expensive therapies like Novartis AG’s Kymriah (tisagenclecleucel), the domestic pharmaceutical industry is proactively voicing concerns about some policies that could do more harm than good.
The Nobel Prize-winning modification that prevents the innate immune system from recognizing injected mRNA as foreign and blocking transcription of the protein it encodes has been found on some occasions to cause ribosomal frameshifting.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven tools have the ability to design new drugs, with a bit of help from humans, said Anders Hogner, from Astrazeneca plc’s R&D department at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Europe in London. “We don’t have anything out there yet,” he added, but the company appears to be working on it.
