Still bathing in the af­ter­glow of its big-mon­ey ac­qui­si­tion of Al­ler­gan, Ab­b­Vie faces the dark cloud of a post-Hu­mi­ra fu­ture — and the dead­line is ap­proach­ing fast. Key to Ab­b­Vie’s plan are two im­munol­o­gy launch­es with ag­gres­sive clin­i­cal dreams; one of those, JAK in­hibitor Rin­voq, is now one step clos­er to an­oth­er Hu­mi­ra-match­ing ap­proval.

Ab­b­Vie’s Rin­voq (upadac­i­tinib) best­ed place­bo in help­ing ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis pa­tients achieve clin­i­cal re­mis­sion at the eight-week mark and sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duced key symp­to­matic bio­mark­ers, in­clud­ing gas­troin­testi­nal in­flam­ma­tion, ac­cord­ing to da­ta from the Phase III U-Achieve study un­veiled Wednes­day.

Twen­ty-six per­cent of pa­tients dosed with a once-dai­ly, 45-mg dose of Rin­voq hit clin­i­cal re­mis­sion af­ter two months com­pared with just 5% on place­bo, Ab­b­Vie said. Rin­voq al­so in­duced gas­troin­testi­nal im­prove­ment in 36% of pa­tients; mean­while, just 7% pa­tients on place­bo hit that mark.

Rin­voq al­so aced its oth­er sec­ondary end­points over place­bo, in­clud­ing achiev­ing clin­i­cal re­sponse in pa­tients and re­duc­ing swelling of the mu­cos­al lin­ing. U-Achieve is one of two in­duc­tive stud­ies Ab­b­Vie has planned for Rin­voq in UC along with three piv­otal tri­als for a pos­si­ble reg­u­la­to­ry sub­mis­sion.

Rin­voq’s UC quest is part of a wide-rang­ing clin­i­cal pro­gram for the drug that in­cludes on­go­ing late-stage tri­als for un­ap­proved in­di­ca­tions in atopic der­mati­tis, pso­ri­at­ic arthri­tis, ax­i­al spondy­loarthri­tis, Crohn’s dis­ease, gi­ant cell ar­teri­tis and Takaya­su’s ar­teri­tis.

The end goal is sim­ple and dri­ven by a loom­ing axe in Ab­b­Vie’s port­fo­lio: Rin­voq must even­tu­al­ly snare enough in­di­ca­tions to make up for the sales loss of megablock­buster Hu­mi­ra, which is fac­ing US biosim­i­lar com­pe­ti­tion start­ing in 2023.

That time­line would give Rin­voq, which orig­i­nal­ly notched an FDA ap­proval to treat mod­er­ate-to-se­vere rheuma­toid arthri­tis back in Au­gust 2019, rough­ly three years to gain enough mo­men­tum to be­gin off­set­ting Hu­mi­ra’s ex­pect­ed de­cline. But it won’t be a sure-fire path to suc­cess: Rin­voq sports a JAK class warn­ing la­bel for se­ri­ous in­fec­tions, ma­lig­nan­cy and throm­bo­sis that has spooked many rheuma­tol­o­gists off the drugs and could make a ma­jor mar­ket en­try in­to any of those new in­di­ca­tions a dif­fi­cult road.

Luck­i­ly, Ab­b­Vie isn’t putting all its eggs in­to one bas­ket as it looks in­to the post-Hu­mi­ra fu­ture. The Chica­go drug­mak­er al­so sports re­cent pso­ri­a­sis launch Skyrizi, which it hopes to pair up with Rin­voq as a one-two punch to match Hu­mi­ra high­est sales peak. Ab­b­Vie is so gung-ho about the pair’s chances that CEO Rick Gon­za­lez posit­ed in Jan­u­ary at the JP Mor­gan Health­care Con­fer­ence that the two drugs could hit a com­bined $20 bil­lion in an­nu­al sales if they snag all of Hu­mi­ra’s ap­provals and add more — atopic der­mati­tis, for in­stance.

Mean­while, Ab­b­Vie is still in the process of di­gest­ing its $63 bil­lion ac­qui­si­tion of Al­ler­gan, which brought aes­thet­ic/ther­a­peu­tic block­buster Botox in­to the fold. Al­ler­gan came in sport­ing boom­ing an­tipsy­chot­ic Vray­lar as well, tack­ing a sec­ond growth dri­ver on­to the new com­pa­ny’s lapel.

As Congress considers whether to adopt sweeping new legislation to lower prescription drug prices across the board, the Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a new report on Monday showing how a more targeted approach on a subset of drugs might be a more efficient way to save government funds.

“This analysis shows that Medicare Part D and Part B spending is highly concentrated among a relatively small share of covered drugs, mainly those without generic or biosimilar competitors,” wrote Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, and Tricia Neuman, SVP of KFF. “Focusing drug price negotiation or reference pricing on a subset of drugs that account for a disproportionate share of spending would be an efficient use of administrative resources, though it would also leave some potential savings on the table.”

It’s always a surprise when a court has to step in to tell the FDA that it erred in performing one of its main duties: classifying whether a medical product is drug or a device.

But that’s what the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did on Friday, making clear to the world’s top drug regulator that Genus Medical Technologies’ contrast agent barium sulfate (also known as Vanilla SilQ) should not be considered a drug, as the FDA had said, but a medical device.

After a turbulent couple of years, Ovid is officially doing away with a program it had once championed in the face of heavy analyst skepticism.

Ovid has discontinued development of OV101, or gaboxadol, in Angelman syndrome and will not pursue further clinical trials for Fragile X syndrome, the company announced Monday morning. The news comes after Ovid had previously paused development in Angelman when the compound flunked a Phase III trial in December.

Close to a year-and-a-half after tapping the brakes on one of its preclinical programs to do some added genetic engineering work on their next-gen CAR-T, Anixa $ANIX Therapeutics says the regulatory light is flashing red on their IND.

The San Jose, CA-based biotech — which changed its name from ITUS in 2018 — explained in late 2019 that they were taking a knee for at least a year so that researchers could go back and amp up the expression of follicle stimulating hormone on T cells to improve targeting of the FSH receptor on a specific set of ovarian cells. That required new vector engineering work by their partners at Moffitt Cancer Center.