Like Berlin patient Timothy Ray Brown before him, London patient Adam Castillejo, whose case was top story of the 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), energized the HIV cure research field by his sheer existence. Curing HIV, Pablo Tebas told the audience at a themed discussion on curative strategies, “has been considered [for] a long time the holy grail.” Read More
Anti-drug antibodies noted in the phase Ib portion of the PREVAIL study in lupus drew queries for Oldwick, N.J.-based Provention Bio Inc. during a conference call related to earnings, but analysts seemed more interested in the company’s later-stage push in type 1 diabetes (T1D). Read More
Bridgebio Pharma Inc. subsidiary QED Therapeutics Inc., seeded in 2018 with $65 million and a license to Novartis AG's infigratinib, said the first patients have been dosed with the drug in two separate cancer trials. Read More
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Thursday extended the public on-ramp for small companies that take longer than five years to generate $100 million in annual revenue, as well as some of the business development companies that invest in them. Read More
As the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus continues to spread around the globe, companies are scrambling to develop effective diagnostics and vaccines to contain the outbreak and reduce future threats. Among those is Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Plymouth Meeting, Pa., which has been awarded a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to speed testing and scale of smart delivery device for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Read More
Tony McKinney, the founder and CEO of Ethismos Research Inc., has worked with the small molecule he plans to take into the clinic this year for the past 10 years. All the while he’s used the same support group of personnel to develop the molecule. Sometimes that group works and sometimes it’s on hiatus. Read More
Pharma has not gotten terribly serious yet about integrating digital health tools into clinical trials, let alone into their product offerings, despite the potential benefits they could offer when it comes to patient adherence, compliance and experience. Still, oncology giant Bristol Myers Squibb Co. has made a small step in that direction by partnering with Paris-based digital therapeutics company Voluntis SA. Read More
Clinical updates, including trial initiations, enrollment status and data readouts and publications: Astrazeneca, Engage, Gilead, Merck, Provention, QED, Tenax. Read More
Regulatory snapshots, including global drug submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Abbvie, Acacia, Adaptive Phage, Agenus, Boehringer Ingelheim, Lilly, Virometix.
