PERTH, Australia – During the COVID-19 pandemic, 90% of Australia’s clinical trials were put on hold, and the market cap of biotech and medical device companies on the Australian Securities Exchange dropped 5% to AU$11 billion (US$7.78 billion), according to a recent report by Australia’s Medical Technologies and Pharmaceuticals Industry Growth Centre.
At its October meeting, the EMA’s Committee for Human Medicinal Products (CHMP) voted in favor of 11 new therapies, two of them for treating cancers and two for treating HIV-1. The European Commission will review the recommendations and make its decisions by the end of 2020.
The large-scale failure of a handful of drugs repurposed for COVID-19 hasn’t slowed efforts to find existing – and new – therapies as well as vaccines that can fight the pandemic, with research updates continuing to roll out.
Once upon a time in an age before the Internet, all things digital and even Hatch-Waxman, the FDA worked in its corner of the government approving drugs and therapeutic equivalents with little fanfare or transparency. Its decisions were duly recorded on paper and filed away. With the files located only at the agency, pharmacies across the country were left to wonder about which drugs could be substituted for another. Their recourse was to pick up the phone and pay for a long-distance call to the FDA every time a question arose. To reduce the number of phone calls it was getting, the FDA printed out a list of approved drugs with their equivalents and sent it to the pharmacies. The year was 1980, and the month was October. Going with the season, the FDA slapped an orange paper cover on the listing, giving birth to the Orange Book.
PERTH, Australia – During the COVID-19 pandemic, 90% of Australia’s clinical trials were put on hold, and the market cap of biotech and medical device companies on the Australian Securities Exchange dropped 5% to AU$11 billion (US$7.78 billion), according to a recent report by Australia’s Medical Technologies and Pharmaceuticals Industry Growth Centre.
In Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Inmazeb (atoltivimab, maftivimab and odesivimab-ebgn), the FDA has approved its first ever treatment for the Ebola virus in pediatric and adult patients.
As expected, weight mitigation and opioid-related risks turned up as the main concerns in briefing documents for the joint advisory panel meeting Oct. 9 to mull the approvability of Alkermes plc’s ALKS-3831.
LONDON – Clinical care guidelines recommending the use of the HIV/AIDS combination lopinavir-ritonavir for the treatment of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 must now be updated, say the authors of a paper reporting the full results of a randomized U.K. study.
PERTH, Australia – Regenerative medicine company Mesoblast Ltd. saw its stock drop 37% on the news that it received an FDA complete response letter to its BLA for Ryoncil (remestemcel-L) for the treatment of pediatric steroid-refractory acute graft-vs.-host disease.
RSS
