Laquin­i­mod was the drug that was go­ing to save Te­va.

Over 14 years, the Is­raeli phar­ma start­ed the com­pound on at least 15 clin­i­cal tri­als, 6 of them Phase III. They want­ed it to re­place the block­buster mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis drug Co­pax­one. But it failed late-stage study af­ter late-stage study, not on­ly in MS but al­so Hunt­ing­ton’s. And in 2018, af­ter the fourth ma­jor whiff in 18 months, Te­va re­turned the drug and all its rights back to sender: Swe­den’s Ac­tive Bio.

Now, Ac­tive says they’re try­ing again: in Crohn’s dis­ease and eye dis­or­ders.

Af­ter van­ish­ing from head­lines for a year and a half fol­low­ing Te­va’s with­draw­al, Ac­tive an­nounced it has been con­duct­ing a 6-month long re­view and is now an­nounc­ing “a new di­rec­tion for the com­pa­ny.” The re­ori­en­ta­tion is an all-but emer­gency mea­sure to sal­vage a biotech whose fu­ture has been in jeop­ardy since even be­fore their ma­jor part­ner de­part­ed.

It will in­volve halt­ing two ear­ly-stage projects, and an­oth­er bid to keep laquin­i­mod alive. The com­pa­ny has long shown far greater faith in the as­set than out­side ob­servers, spot­light­ing the clin­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty even in tri­als where the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary end­point failed.

When Te­va walked away, Ac­tive said it would con­tin­ue ex­plor­ing the drug as a treat­ment for neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion, but now, based in part on a Phase IIa study pub­lished in 2014, they say the clear­est prospect is Crohn’s dis­ease. They’ll al­so spend the next 12 months study­ing re­sults in wet AMD and uveitis pre­clin­i­cal­ly. Any Hunt­ing­ton’s and MS ef­forts are over, they said.

Two oth­er drugs are in play. Tasquin­i­mod, an im­munomod­u­la­tor, will en­ter a Phase Ib/IIa tri­al on mul­ti­ple myelo­ma in part­ner­ship with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia Med­ical School. Nap­tu­momab, part­nered with NeoTX, is in Phase Ia/IIb for sol­id tu­mors. Pro­jects for im­mune-mod­u­lat­ing com­pounds paquin­i­mod and SILC have been aban­doned.

Ac­tive Biotech first no­ti­fied the pub­lic of its pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion in De­cem­ber 2017, af­ter the sec­ond ma­jor laquin­i­mod MS fail­ure, telling share­hold­ers it “lacks fund­ing to en­sure its op­er­a­tions for the com­ing twelve-month pe­ri­od.” CEO Helén Tu­ves­son, ap­point­ed in mid-2017, moved swift­ly af­ter Te­va’s de­par­ture, most no­tably sell­ing their prop­er­ty in Lund for 275 mil­lion SEK  (~$29 mil­lion).

Te­va, mean­while, has watched the Co­pax­one com­pe­ti­tion they hoped to head off come in full force. No­var­tis and My­lan each now have copy­cats on the mar­ket. And rev­enues from the drug have fall­en pre­cip­i­tous­ly in the last 2.5 years, from a peak of $842 mil­lion in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2017, to $271 mil­lion as of Q3 2019. Still, that’s less of a drop-off than some an­a­lysts ex­pect­ed and have helped keep the com­pa­ny afloat amid oth­er prob­lems across their busi­ness, in­clud­ing a fal­ter­ing gener­ics busi­ness and the law­suits they face for their role in the opi­oid abuse epi­dem­ic.

Blueprint Medicines announced this morning that the second part of its study on Ayvakit in non-advanced systemic mastocytosis (SM) — a rare disease in which a type of white blood cells known as mast cells builds up — met all endpoints, but the biopharma left key questions unanswered.

In 212 patients, with 141 in the treatment arm and 71 in the control arm, patients who got Ayvakit saw an average 15.6-point decrease in their symptom scores compared to a 9.2-point decrease in the placebo arm at 24 weeks. In an extension study, those on Ayvakit saw their symptom scores drop by 20.2 points by week 48.

GSK has landed a new first from UNICEF — the first-ever contract for malaria vaccines, worth up to $170 million for 18 million vaccine doses distributed over the next three years.

The vaccine, known as Mosquirix or RTS,S, won WHO’s backing last October after a controversial start, but UNICEF said these doses will potentially save thousands of lives every year.

“We hope this is just the beginning,” Etleva Kadilli, director of UNICEF’s supply division, said. “Continued innovation is needed to develop new and next-generation vaccines to increase available supply, and enable a healthier vaccine market. This is a giant step forward in our collective efforts to save children’s lives and reduce the burden of malaria as part of wider malaria prevention and control programmes.”