Af­ter hint­ing it was ex­plor­ing the le­gal­i­ty of the FDA’s ap­proval of a ri­val drug from fam­i­ly-run com­pa­ny Ja­cobus Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, Cat­a­lyst Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals on Wednes­day filed a law­suit against the health reg­u­la­tor — ef­fec­tive­ly ac­cus­ing the agency of bow­ing to po­lit­i­cal pres­sure sur­round­ing sky­rock­et­ing drug prices.

Patrick McE­namy Twit­ter

Be­fore Cat­a­lyst’s Fir­dapse (which car­ries an av­er­age an­nu­al list price of $375,000) was sanc­tioned for use in Lam­bert-Eaton myas­thenic syn­drome (LEMS) by the FDA, hun­dreds of pa­tients had been able to ac­cess a sim­i­lar drug from com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies for a frac­tion of the cost, or Ja­cobus’ for free, as part of an FDA-rat­i­fied com­pas­sion­ate use pro­gram. But the ap­proval of the Cat­a­lyst drug — ac­com­pa­nied by mar­ket ex­clu­siv­i­ty span­ning sev­en years — ef­fec­tive­ly pre­clud­ed Ja­cobus and com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies from sell­ing their ver­sions.

Then, in an un­ex­pect­ed twist, weeks ago the FDA en­dorsed New Jer­sey-based Ja­cobus’ ver­sion in pe­di­atric pa­tients, on the ba­sis of adult da­ta — a move that could spark off-la­bel pre­scrip­tion in adults (As far as the FDA is con­cerned, doc­tors can pre­scribe drugs for off-la­bel use when they judge that it is med­ical­ly ap­pro­pri­ate for their pa­tient). Cat­a­lysts’ shares $CPRX sank on the an­nounce­ment and have not since re­vived. Adding fu­el to the fire, ear­li­er this week Ja­cobus re­vealed its drug, Ruzur­gi, will car­ry a list price that is less than half of Fir­dapse’s.

Cat­a­lyst main­tains that typ­i­cal­ly, cov­ered pa­tients pay less than $10 per month out-of-pock­et.

In LEMS pa­tients, the body’s own im­mune sys­tem launch­es an at­tack on the neu­ro­mus­cu­lar junc­tion — which con­nects nerves and mus­cles. The con­di­tion is as­so­ci­at­ed with oth­er au­toim­mune dis­eases, but tends to oc­cur in pa­tients with can­cer. Glob­al­ly it is es­ti­mat­ed to af­fect three per mil­lion in­di­vid­u­als, ac­cord­ing to the FDA, but its pe­di­atric preva­lence is not clear. Cat­a­lyst sug­gest­ed there are 3,000 LEMS US pa­tients, of which 300 are on Fir­dapse. Some es­ti­mates sug­gest there are few­er than three dozen pe­di­atric pa­tients in the Unit­ed States.

Un­der fed­er­al law, the agency is meant to treat all com­pa­nies in the same man­ner. Cat­a­lyst has as­sert­ed the agency un­der­mined the com­pa­ny’s or­phan drug ex­clu­siv­i­ty, and vi­o­lat­ed fed­er­al law by play­ing fa­vorites in con­text of a hy­per­vig­i­lant pric­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

The ap­proval let­ters for Cat­a­lyst and Ja­cobus sug­gest that while the for­mer sub­mit­ted a body of clin­i­cal tri­al ev­i­dence as part of the pack­age the FDA re­viewed, the lat­ter did not sub­mit da­ta from cer­tain tox­i­col­o­gy stud­ies. In­stead, the FDA has asked Ja­cobus to pro­vide these da­ta as a post-mar­ket­ing re­quire­ment.

“We felt that the FDA’s ap­proval of Ruzur­gi was ar­bi­trary, capri­cious and not in ac­cord with the Food, Drug & Cos­met­ic Act,” Cat­a­lyst chief Patrick McE­nany told End­points News. 

“We be­lieve the FDA was im­prop­er­ly in­flu­enced in mak­ing this de­ci­sion by po­lit­i­cal pres­sures with re­gard to high drug pric­ing and we think it sets a hor­ri­ble prece­dent for oth­er com­pa­nies work­ing to de­vel­op drugs to treat rare dis­eases — it could in fact dis­cour­age com­pa­nies from in­vest­ing mil­lions of dol­lars and spend­ing many years to do this,” he said.

Ear­li­er this year, Ver­mont Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders — ahead of his an­nounce­ment to make a sec­ond at­tempt at the pres­i­den­cy — spot­light­ed Cat­a­lyst for the “im­moral ex­ploita­tion of pa­tients.”

McE­nany em­pha­sized that Cat­a­lyst has spent more than $100 mil­lion dol­lars in de­vel­op­ing the drug over the last sev­en years — and that his hope is the law­suit will cul­mi­nate in the with­draw­al of the Ruzur­gi ap­proval.

An FDA spokesper­son said the agency does not com­ment on pend­ing lit­i­ga­tion. End­points News has con­tact­ed Ja­cobus for com­ment.

Im­age: An­drew Harnik, AP Im­ages

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.