Despite key vacancies, ongoing staffing challenges and policy issues at the U.S. CDC, FDA and NIH, some of the regulatory churn that roiled those agencies in the first year of the second Trump administration is settling a bit, at least in terms of the number of executive orders (EOs) coming out of the Oval Office.
In what shakes out to be the largest follow-on stock offering in biopharma history, Revolution Medicines Inc., an oncology company that was the subject of buyout rumors earlier this year, priced 10.56 million shares to raise $1.5 billion just two days after wowing investors with top-line phase III data of its RAS inhibitor daraxonrasib in patients with metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
The U.S. FDA’s latest draft guidance on gene therapies focuses on nonclinical studies using next-generation sequencing-based methods and bioinformatics to evaluate safety risks associated with off-target editing and loss of genome integrity in human gene-edited products.
If a recent warning letter is anything to go by, the U.S. FDA could be using the 2013 Drug Supply Chain Security Act as another enforcement tool to shut down unauthorized suppliers by clamping down on the dispensers that purchase their unapproved drug products.
The U.S. FDA sent out a friendly reminder to more than 2,200 sponsors and researchers, associated with more than 3,000 clinical trials, who may be delinquent in disclosing the results of those studies on clinicaltrials.gov.
Avanos Medical Inc. has agreed to be acquired by affiliates of American Industrial Partners (AIP) in an all-cash deal valuing the company at approximately $1.272 billion. Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Avanos stockholders will receive $25 per share in cash for each share of common stock they hold.
Abbvie Inc. is buying exclusive rights to develop, manufacture and commercialize two Nav1.8 inhibitors for pain – HSK-55718 and HSK-51155 – from Haisco Pharmaceutical Group Co. Ltd. for $30 million up front and up to $715 million in milestone payments, plus royalties.
Tr1x Inc. was founded with a simple but ambitious goal: to change how autoimmune and inflammatory diseases are treated, moving away from chronic treatment and toward durable cures. “We are trying to flip the script on regulatory T cells (Tregs),” Tr1x CEO David de Vries told BioWorld. “The goal is to reset the immune system rather than continuously suppress it, and we believe we have a unique technology to do that.”
Amazon is extending the reach of its “everything store” into drug R&D with the launch of an artificial intelligence-powered Bio Discovery business. The company has compiled a catalogue of 40-plus foundation models that have been trained on extensive biology datasets and are able to generate and evaluate drug molecules in silico. For now, this covers antibodies only, but it is intended to move into other modalities.
Becoming the first and only fully FDA-approved treatment for focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), Travere Therapeutics Inc.’s Filspari (sparsentan) has gained access to a second lucrative market with a regulatory package that validates proteinuria as a surrogate endpoint.