Big pharma continues to seek innovation in China despite rising geopolitical tension, speakers said at the Asia Bio Partnering Forum in Singapore April 24.
The existence of two approved therapies, Lumakras (sotorasib, Amgen Inc.) and Karzati (adagrasib, Mirati Therapeutics Inc.), has been a triumphant success against KRAS, a protein that was once considered undruggable.
“Hot and cold tumors may need different types of immunotherapy,” Jay Berzofsky told the audience as the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) 2024 annual meeting kicked off this weekend. In an educational session on cancer vaccines, Berzofsky, who is head of the National Cancer Institute’s Molecular Immunogenetics and Vaccine Research section, explained that when immunotherapy fails in hot tumors, it fails despite the existence of an immune response, due to an immunosuppressive microenvironment.
Prior to this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), it had been 14 years since metastasis had been the subject of a plenary session. So, the Tuesday session on “Evolution of the genome, microenvironment, and host through metastasis” had plenty of new insights to share.
Stable disease in about half the patients tested wasn’t enough for Wall Street, and shares of Vincerx Pharma Inc. (NASDAQ:VINC) nosedived by $3.72, or 78%, to close April 9 at $1.06 on the disclosure of preliminary phase I data with small-molecule drug conjugate VIP-236 in metastatic solid tumors.
“A biotech company cannot survive on ‘drug efficacy’ alone,” former Korea Drug Development Fund (KDDF) CEO Hyunsong Muk said recently, “because novel drug development is not just a scientific problem.” Financial toxicity is, in fact, a major obstacle for biotech companies trying to advance preclinical candidates to early stage clinical trials, Muk said at Novo Nordisk A/S’ Partnering Day and Symposium on April 4 in Seoul, South Korea.
As with most common diseases of the developed world, aging is the major risk factor for developing cancer. Most of the half-dozen hallmarks of precancer that were published last week by investigators from Vanderbilt University and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are also hallmarks of aging.
Unfortunately, scientists reported at the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) 2024 annual meeting this week that accelerated aging is increasing, and may be driving an increase in early-onset cancers.
After many years of testing different monoclonal antibodies against amyloid-β protein, the results obtained are far from being outstanding, and the control of the progression and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains elusive. At the recent AD/PD 2024 conference held in Lisbon, new non-anti-amyloidogenic strategies in the starting line against AD were discussed. Professor Einar Sigurdsson from New York University gave a presentation entitled, “Single domain antibodies for therapy and diagnosis of synucleinopathies and tauopathies.”
Precision psychiatry got some love at two quite different meetings this week, the European Congress of Neuropsychopharmacology’s New Frontiers meeting and BioEurope Spring. The New Frontiers Meeting, an annual two-day meeting dedicated to cutting-edge issues in brain disease research, focused on big-picture and scientific – at times almost philosophical – questions of how to get to a classification scheme for brain disorders that aligns with the underlying biology.
One topic at the 31st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2024) held in Denver this month was that resistance to antiretroviral therapy (ART) has become a public health problem for people living with HIV. Without a vaccine or a cure, these patients depend on treatments that suppress viremia by preventing the virus from replicating. They are lifelong treatments and, until new advances succeed in eradicating the virus from reservoirs, the only option available.