Triarm Therapeutics Ltd. is on a mission to democratize CAR T therapies to make them more accessible and affordable, Triarm CEO Jay Zhang told BioWorld. “Nearly half of the patients eligible for CAR T therapies still cannot get treated, and the main reason is the expense, and the second is they cannot afford to wait.
As investment in Asia biohubs continues into 2024, Merck KGaA’s Milliporesigma is the latest to drop more than €300 million (US$328 million) into a new bioprocessing production center in Daejeon, South Korea. Other big pharmas, including Switzerland’s Novartis AG, Denmark’s Novo Nordisk A/S and China’s Wuxi Biologics (Cayman) Inc., are also making multimillion-dollar investments in the Asia-Pacific region, according to company announcements made in March 2024.
Aquestive Therapeutics Inc.’s oral epinephrine prodrug to treat life-threatening allergic reactions, Anaphylm, produced a faster time to maximum concentration than currently available autoinjectors in healthy adults, early pivotal phase III data show, meeting both pharmacokinetic (PK) primary and secondary endpoints.
South Korean biopharmaceutical company Celltrion Inc. submitted a BLA to the U.S. FDA on March 10 to gain approval for its Xolair (omalizumab; Novartis AG) biosimilar, CT-P39, across major indications of asthma, food allergy and chronic spontaneous urticaria.
Several presentations at the 31st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2024) held in Denver from March 3 to 6, 2024, focused on childhood HIV and highlighted the lack of pediatric data. The epicenter of this pandemic in the youngest is in the southern region of the African continent. However, there are few studies for children with HIV, mostly for the northern hemisphere.
OSE Immunotherapeutics SA disclosed a $713 million deal with Abbvie Inc. for preclinical-stage monoclonal antibody OSE-230, a potentially first-in-class therapy for treating a range of inflammatory diseases, while Idorsia Ltd. found a partner for two phase III-stage assets in Viatris Inc., as dealmaking continues strong in 2024.
The biological processes giving rise to the central nervous system symptoms of long COVID remain a mystery. But multiple studies suggest they do not appear to be a result of a direct viral infection of brain tissue. The latest such research, which appeared online in Nature Neuroscience on Feb. 16, 2024, demonstrated that local immune response in brain tissues persisted long after SARS-CoV-2 virus had disappeared.
Autoantibodies call to mind disease – autoimmune disease, to be exact. But the physiological roles of autoantibodies are, at the very least, more complex than this view accounts for. “The autoantibody reactome is extraordinary,” Aaron Ring told BioWorld. “Nearly everyone has autoantibodies, whether they know it or not.”
Ono Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. inked deals with Shattuck Labs Inc. and Numab Therapeutics AG aimed at bolstering its pipeline in oncology and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Ono struck a drug discovery collaboration and option agreement with Shattuck Labs to generate bifunctional fusion proteins for pathways involved in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. It also signed a global research, development and commercialization deal with Numab for its NM-49, a multispecific antibody designed to activate tumor-associated macrophage phagocytosis for treating cancers.
In August 2020, Johnson & Johnson paid $6.5 billion cash to acquire Momenta Pharmaceuticals Inc. That strengthened J&J’s immune-mediated disease portfolio and grew its interest in autoantibody-driven disease therapies by bringing nipocalimab into the fold. Now the investment is paying off with top-line results of phase II and III studies that hit their primary endpoints using the fully human glycosylated monoclonal antibody targeting the human neonatal Fc receptor. The studies were in treating generalized myasthenia gravis and in Sjögren’s disease.
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