Pfizer Inc.’s appetite for acquisitions shows no signs of abating as it announced this morning its plan to acquire biotech Seagen Inc. for a whopping $43 billion in a move that will double the size of its early stage oncology pipeline. Under the deal, unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both firms, Pfizer will pay Seagen $229 per share. Bothell, Wash.-based Seagen expects to amass $2.2 billion in revenue in 2023, representing 12% year-on-year-growth, royalties and collaboration and license agreements from its four, FDA-approved products for the treatment of solid tumors and hematologic malignancies, antibody-drug conjugate drugs Adcetris (brentuximab vedotin), Padcev (enfortumab vedotin) and Tivdak (tisotumab vedotin), and tyrosin kinase inhibitor Tukysa (tucatinib).

Pricing won’t be known until later for Pfizer Inc.’s Zavzpret (zavegepant), which became the first and only calcitonin gene-related peptide receptor antagonist nasal spray approved by the U.S. FDA for acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. The product is slated to launch this summer. Meanwhile, Wall Street has questions about New York-based Pfizer’s performance in the migraine space.

As several key revenue-driving products fall off patent in coming years, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly focused on mechanisms by which they can draw innovation to them. What launched as the Partner of Choice organization, for example, has now become the newly named Pfizer Ignite model – an end-to-end engine designed to bring innovation to the pharmaceutical company in return for services.

Although the U.S. FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously, 12-0, March 1 that the data GSK plc presented was adequate to support the safety of its respiratory syncytial virus vaccine, several panelists cautioned the FDA against viewing the vote as a recommendation to license the vaccine before more data are available.

Citing efforts to “encourage innovation,” China’s National Healthcare Security Administration included 111 new drugs in its National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL). The adjustment, shared Jan. 18, 2023, also removed three drugs, leaving the latest NRDL with a total of 2,967 drugs. Most of the newly added drugs are recently approved drugs, with many making it to the market in the last five years. Twenty-three were approved in 2022.

Harmonization and simplification won the day as the U.S. FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) looked toward the future of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. Jan. 26. The committee voted unanimously, 21-0, to recommend using the same strain composition for all COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S., whether they’re used for primary doses or boosters. Such standardization also would align the composition of Novavax Inc.’s protein-based vaccine with that of the mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc.-Biontech SE.

Citing efforts to “encourage innovation,” China’s National Healthcare Security Administration included 111 new drugs in its National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL). The adjustment, shared Jan. 18, 2023, also removed three drugs, leaving the latest NRDL with a total of 2,967 drugs. Most of the newly added drugs are recently approved drugs, with many making it to the market in the last five years. Twenty-three were approved in 2022.

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus that’s responsible for COVID-19 continues to evolve across the world, a global response, similar to what’s used with influenza, would be ideal in evaluating and recommending vaccine strain composition changes from year to year. But “the current diversity of vaccine manufacturers and complexities in global supply of COVID-19 vaccines would make a globally coordinated, simultaneous vaccine composition evaluation and recommendation quite challenging,” the U.S. FDA said in its briefing document for the Jan. 26 meeting of the Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.