In case you didn’t get the memo, Gilead is bet­ting that a cock­tail ap­proach will win them a cov­et­ed place in the NASH show­down.

A day af­ter draw­ing at­ten­tion to pos­i­tive proof-of-con­cept da­ta around its cilofex­or/fir­so­co­stat ther­a­py, the Big Biotech says it’s kick­ing off an­oth­er clin­i­cal tri­al in col­lab­o­ra­tion with No­vo Nordisk in which semaglu­tide will be added to form a three-drug reg­i­men.

A block­buster fa­vorite among up-and-com­ing di­a­betes drugs, semaglu­tide is a GLP-1 ana­logue that not on­ly stim­u­lates se­cre­tion of in­sulin but al­so is thought to im­prove glu­cose me­tab­o­lism in the liv­er and in­crease fat­ty acid ox­i­da­tion. Giv­en that more than 40% of NASH pa­tients have di­a­betes and more than 80% of them are al­so liv­ing with obe­si­ty (No­vo Nordisk’s num­bers) — an­oth­er tar­get in­di­ca­tion for semaglu­tide — the Dan­ish drug­mak­er has called its in­ter­est in the dis­ease a “nat­ur­al ex­pan­sion.”

For Gilead, this will be an op­por­tu­ni­ty to for­ti­fy a grow­ing NASH port­fo­lio as well as flex its sci­en­tif­ic mus­cles. The part­ner­ship al­so cov­ers a po­ten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tion on pre­clin­i­cal re­search to bet­ter un­der­stand an ail­ment of­ten dubbed a silent dis­ease.

With car­diopul­monary sales wan­ing — caused by loom­ing gener­ic en­try and il­lus­trat­ed by a round of lay­offs an­nounced this week — the hep C op­er­a­tions shrink­ing, HIV un­der as­sault and the bold new CAR-T ven­ture slow to im­press, Gilead is pressed to find a new area in which it can es­tab­lish as for­mi­da­ble a pres­ence as it had in the an­tivi­ral realm.

It took a hit when selon­sert­ib flopped in a close­ly-watched Phase III, out­per­formed by the place­bo at the low dose, dash­ing hopes for a vault to the lead po­si­tion as a flock of small play­ers take turns to present their own late-stage re­sults.

As ri­vals — in­clud­ing In­ter­cept, Gen­fit, Madri­gal and NGM Bio, which is part­nered with Mer­ck — crowd in, Gilead has been pick­ing up ear­ly-stage as­sets in pur­suit of a sus­tain­ing fran­chise. In fact, cilofex­or came from the buy­out of Phenex Phar­ma and you might re­mem­ber fir­so­co­stat as GS-0976, which Gilead paid Nim­bus $600 mil­lion for.

The com­pa­ny al­so hasn’t giv­en up on selon­sert­ib, which is be­ing test­ed in a triple com­bo with cilofex­or and fir­so­co­stat.

Im­age: Er­ic Ris­berg AP

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

Amgen has signed up to be AbbVie’s neighbor in South San Francisco as it moves into a nine-story R&D facility in the booming biotech hub.

The arrangement gives Amgen 240,000 square feet of space on the Gateway of Pacific Campus, just a few minutes drive from its current digs at Oyster Point. The new hub will open in 2022 and house the big biotech’s Bay Area employees working on cardiometabolic, inflammation and oncology research.

Scripps and AbbVie go way back. Research conducted in the lab of Scripps scientist Richard Lerner led to the discovery of Humira. The antibody, approved by the FDA in 2002 and sold by AbbVie, went on to become the world’s bestselling treatment. In 2018, the drugmaker and the non-profit organization signed a pact focused on developing cancer treatments — and now, the scope of that partnership has broadened to encompass a range of diseases, including immunological and neurological conditions.

Three Samsung executives in Korea are going to jail.

The convictions came in what prosecutors had billed as “biggest crime of evidence destruction in the history of South Korea”: a case of alleged corporate intrigue that was thrown open when investigators found what was hidden beneath the floor of a Samsung BioLogics plant. Eight employees in total were found guilty of evidence tampering and the three executives were each sentenced to up to two years in prison.

Cellarity started with a simple — but far from easy — idea that Avak Kahvejian and his team were floating around at Flagship Pioneering: to digitally encode a cell.

As he and his senior associate Nick Plugis dug deeper into the concept, they found that most of the models others have developed take a bottom-up approach, where they assemble the molecules inside cells and the connections between them from scratch. What if they opt for a top-down approach, aided by single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning, to gauge the behavior of the entire cellular network?

The biopharma R&D food chain is paying off with a plan at Sanofi to pitch regulators on a new drug for an orphan disease called cold agglutinin disease.

The pharma giant ushered out a statement Tuesday morning — after it spelled out plans to radically restructure the company, abandoning cardio and diabetes research altogether — saying that their C1s inhibitor sutimlimab had cleared the pivotal study.