NEW YORK – As the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee was hearing testimony from a handful of experts Tuesday morning on how to tackle the rising cost of drug prices, a few hundred miles away panelists at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference also were discussing the need to cut patients' out-of-pocket expenses. Addressing a roomful of biopharma execs and investors in the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square, the panel members all agreed that the Trump administration's proposed International Pricing Index (IPI) payment model, aimed at reducing reimbursement levels for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is not the way to do it.
NEW YORK – These days "it's almost mandatory to have a session" on immune-oncology, noted Roth Capital's Jotin Marango, kicking off the 21st annual BIO CEO & Investor meeting with a panel on reshaping the tumor microenvironment via immunotherapies. But, despite the excitement generated by what's happening in the field, there's "so much nuance and few people actually understand and appreciate it all," he added.
Sanofi SA's $4.8 billion bet on Nanobody developer Ablynx NV gained further validation Wednesday, with the pharma winning an FDA nod for Cablivi (caplacizumab-yhdp) in rare and sometimes fatal blood disorder acquired thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (aTTP). U.S. approval comes about six months after the first commercial nanobody – a single-domain antibody that offers the specificity with the advantages of a smaller-sized molecule – gained approval in Europe for the same indication.
Just ahead of its Nov. 13 PDUFA date, revefenacin won FDA approval, becoming the first once-daily nebulized bronchodilator cleared for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the U.S.
Briefing documents released ahead of Friday's meeting of the FDA's Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee (AADPAC) suggest Acelrx Pharmaceuticals Inc. might have better luck the second time around with its sublingual 30-mcg tablet version of sufentanil given by way of a non-invasive, single-dose applicator.
Top-line results from the phase III PREVENT study testing Soliris (eculizumab) in rare disease neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) "far exceeded our expectations," said Ludwig Hantson, CEO of Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is now moving to engage regulators on submissions to expand use of the complement inhibitor in NMOSD, a complement-mediated disorder for which there currently are no approved therapies.
Cambridge, U.K.-based Astrazeneca plc and its Medimmune unit will introduce the first new drug for hairy cell leukemia (HCL) in more than two decades, with the FDA's approval Thursday for Lumoxiti (moxetumomab pasudotox-tdfk). The CD22-targeted cytotoxin is indicated for adults with relapsed or refractory disease who have received at least two prior systemic therapies, including a purine nucleoside analogue.
You could say Invenra Inc. has been working toward bispecific antibodies for years. Founded in 2011, the University of Wisconsin-Madison spin-off launched with the aim of making antibody drug discovery more efficient, eventually developing a platform based on ultra-high-throughput technology capable of synthesizing hundreds of thousands of full-length antibodies using cell-free expression, with a screening platform that allows researchers to pinpoint those with the most promising biological activity.
The team at Bellerophon Therapeutics Inc. intends to further analyze data after an unexpectedly disappointing interim look at the phase III INOvation-1 study testing its inhaled nitric oxide delivery system in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) failed to show sufficient improvements in the six-minute walk distance (6WMD), the primary endpoint. That review prompted the data monitoring committee (DMC) to recommend the study be stopped for futility and sent shares of the Warren, N.J.-based company (NASDAQ:BLPH) falling more than 68 percent Tuesday.
