Chi­na is re­port­ed­ly ap­prov­ing its 6th PD-1(L)1 drug in just over a year — and Am­gen will be pleased with this one.

The OK for tislelizum­ab would be the first mar­ket­ed prod­uct to be de­vel­oped by BeiGene, the em­i­nent Bei­jing-based biotech that Am­gen re­cent­ly took a $2.7 bil­lion stake in. Chi­na’s Cen­ter for Drug Eval­u­a­tion has com­plet­ed tech­ni­cal re­view and sent the NDA to the Na­tion­al Med­ical Prod­ucts Ad­min­is­tra­tion with a rec­om­men­da­tion to ap­prove, Chi­nese me­dia out­let Jiemi­an re­port­ed.

BeiGene is all set to hit the ground run­ning. Hav­ing part­nered with Cel­gene to hawk Revlim­id, Abrax­ane and Vi­daza in Chi­na, the drug­mak­er has built a 700-strong com­mer­cial­iza­tion team. The Am­gen deal al­so puts them in charge of sell­ing Xge­va (deno­sum­ab), Kypro­lis (carfil­zomib) and Blin­cy­to (bli­na­tu­momab) — pro­vid­ed the last two come through af­ter Phase III de­vel­op­ment.

Fol­low­ing the ini­tial in­di­ca­tion of chron­ic Hodgkin’s lym­phoma, BeiGene has al­ready filed an sN­DA to use tislelizum­ab in urothe­lial car­ci­no­ma.

While Cel­gene once held rights to the drug out­side Chi­na, BeiGene re­gained glob­al rights af­ter its US part­ner broke off the pact in the wake of a buy­out by Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb, the mak­er of Op­di­vo.

The fast pace re­flects just how rapid­ly the check­point mar­ket has evolved in Chi­na. Jun­shi and In­novent scored the first ap­provals for their home­grown ther­a­pies, Tuoyi and Tyvyt, though ac­cord­ing to Jiemi­an it’s Mer­ck’s Keytru­da that racked up the most sales: RMB$2 bil­lion ($280 mil­lion) since last Ju­ly. The num­bers for Jun­shi’s Tuoyi and In­novent’s Tyvyt are RMB$332 mil­lion ($47 mil­lion) and RMB$308 mil­lion ($43 mil­lion), re­spec­tive­ly.

Giv­en that com­pet­i­tive — some would say com­modi­tized — land­scape, BeiGene is look­ing to make a name for it­self through zanubru­ti­nib, a BTK in­hibitor po­si­tioned to chal­lenge the dom­i­nance of Im­bru­vi­ca. The drug is un­der re­view at the FDA af­ter nab­bing break­through sta­tus.

The FDA’s Arthritis Advisory Committee on Thursday voted 10 for and 8 against the approval of ChemoCentryx’s $CCXI investigational drug avacopan as a treatment for adults with a rare and serious disease known as anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody (ANCA)-vasculitis.

The vote on whether the FDA should approve the drug was preceded by a split vote of 9 to 9 on whether the efficacy data support approval, and 10 to 8 that the safety profile of avacopan is adequate enough to support approval.

Droves of House Democrats in Washington and members of the European Parliament have now glommed onto a major push by India and South Africa at the WTO to abolish all IP around Covid-19 vaccines.

At first blush, waiving this IP sounds like an easy win: More Covid-19 vaccines made locally for more people means more lives saved. Simple enough, especially as low-income countries have received just a tiny fraction of the world’s vaccine allotment so far.