Gen­Sight has a gene ther­a­py mys­tery on its hands, which is about the last thing it want­ed at the end of Phase III.

As­sess­ing the 48-week da­ta from its first piv­otal test of a treat­ment for Leber Hered­i­tary Op­tic Neu­ropa­thy — or LHON, a rare ge­net­ic dis­ease that caus­es blind­ness — in­ves­ti­ga­tors pulled out a mean­ing­ful im­prove­ment in sight in their one treat­ed eye.  

Bernard Gilly

The mys­tery: The oth­er eyes that re­ceived a sham ther­a­py did just as well with their eye­sight. Ex­act­ly as well.

That makes the Phase III study of GS010 a fail­ure, and rather than stay to try and solve the mys­tery, in­vestors bailed, dri­ving down the Eu­roNext stock $SIGHT down by 34%.

One of the rea­sons why the ear­ly gene ther­a­py pi­o­neers like Gen­Sight picked hered­i­tary eye dis­eases to go af­ter first is that the eye is a con­tained unit, lim­it­ing off-tar­get ef­fects. But Gen­Sight’s Paris-based CEO Bernard Gilly says that as on­ly a frac­tion of pa­tients his­tor­i­cal­ly see a spon­ta­neous im­prove­ment in eye­sight, he’s won­der­ing if the ther­a­py in­ject­ed in­to one eye de­liv­ers an un­ex­pect­ed ben­e­fit to the oth­er.

At the same time, Gen­Sight tout­ed a hit on a reti­nal bio­mark­er for the dis­ease, which they claimed as ev­i­dence that the ther­a­py had an im­pact sep­a­rate from the sham.

“The fact that struc­tur­al mea­sures of the reti­na showed such a large sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence with treat­ment is com­pelling and ob­jec­tive ev­i­dence that this gene ther­a­py pro­tects the in­tegri­ty of many reti­nal gan­glion cells from the dam­age of LHON,” com­ment­ed com­pa­ny co-founder José-Alain Sa­hel.

That’s a messy ar­gu­ment, with the com­pa­ny ar­gu­ing that it ap­peared the ther­a­py im­proved sight for both eyes, but on­ly hit the sec­ondary bio­mark­er in the treat­ed eye. 

The com­pa­ny — which tried and failed to make it on­to Nas­daq — will be left look­ing for more da­ta to an­a­lyze from its next two Phase III stud­ies, which are up­com­ing. But easy ex­pla­na­tions will be hard to come by.

By Mwango Kashoki, MD, MPH, Vice President-Technical, and Richard Macaulay, Senior Director, of Parexel Regulatory & Access

In recent years, we’ve seen a significant uptake in the use of regulatory options by companies looking to accelerate the journey of life-saving drugs to market. In 2018, 73% of the novel drugs approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) were designated under one or more expedited development program categories (Fast Track, Breakthrough Therapy, Priority Review, and Accelerated Approval).ᶦ

As the world becomes increasingly dependant on Asia for the ingredients of its medicines, Sanofi sees business to be done in Europe.

The French drugmaker said it’s creating the world’s second largest active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) manufacturer by spinning out its six current sites into a standalone company: Brindisi (Italy), Frankfurt Chemistry (Germany), Haverhill (UK), St Aubin les Elbeuf (France), Újpest (Hungary) and Vertolaye (France). They have mapped out €1 billion in expected sales by 2022 and 3,100 employees for the new operations headquartered in France.

SoftBank has found its newest biotech investment.

The Japanese bank has invested $165 million into Karius, a company that uses blood tests to diagnose infectious diseases, as part of its new Vision Fund 2. The full scope of the new fund has yet to be announced, but the first and newly-beleaguered Vision Fund poured $100 billion into technology companies, including the biotechs Vir Biotechnology and Roivant and the sequencing company 10x Genomics.

An experimental drug that promises to be the first anti-infective agent to prove superior to vancomycin — an antibiotic approved in 1958 — has notched the FDA’s “breakthrough” status.

ContraFect said the designation was based on Phase II data in which exebacase was tested against a superbug known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA. In a subgroup analysis, the clinical responder rate at day 14 was 42.8% higher than that among those treated with standard of care, the company said (p=0.010).

For two months, as the novel coronavirus swelled from a few early cases tied to a Wuhan market to a global epidemic, most of the world’s focus and dollars have flowed toward emergency initiatives: building vaccines at a record pace, plucking experimental antivirals out of freezers to see what sticks and immunizing mice for new antibodies.

Now a new and well-funded collaboration between Harvard and a top Chinese research institute will play the long game. In a 5-year, $115 million initiative backed by China Evergrande Group, researchers from the Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Guangzhou Institute for Respiratory Health will study the virus in an effort to develop therapies against infections by the novel coronavirus, known as SARS–CoV-2, and to prevent new ones.

Zoetis forked over $85 million in 2017 to acquire Nexvet Biopharma and its pipeline of monoclonal antibodies. Juergen Horn, Nexvet’s former chief product development officer, has now secured $15 million for his own biologic company for animals: Invetx.

Buoyed by emerging advances in gene therapies for humans, scientists have started looking at harnessing the technology for animals setting up companies such as Penn-partnered Scout Bio and George Church-founded Rejuvenate Bio. But akin to Nexvet, Invetx is working on leveraging the time-tested science of monoclonal antibodies to treat chronic diseases that afflict man’s best friend.

As the coronavirus originating out of Wuhan spreads to South Korea, Italy and Iran, stoking already intense fears of a pandemic, GlaxoSmithKline has found another pair of trusted hands to place its adjuvant system. China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals will add the adjuvant to its preclinical, protein-based vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2.

Clover, which is based in the inland city of Chengdu, boasts of a platform dubbed Trimer-Tag that produces covalently-trimerized fusion proteins. Its candidate, COVID-19 S-Trimer, resembles the viral spike (S)-protein found in the virus.