CHICAGO — Amgen’s R&D team is quite proud of their program for AMG 420, a BCMA-targeted bispecific T cell engager they plan to hustle through pivotal studies in search of an accelerated OK by the FDA. And the whole BiTE platform is being developed as an avenue to greatly expand their presence in the oncology market.

The pharma giant was on hand at ASCO to offer the latest update — a common theme at the meeting this year — on ‘420, while sharing the limelight with some of the rest of the BiTEs now working their way up the pipeline.

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Over the past 7 years, Calico has been so much more than your average, run-of-the-mill secretive biotech players. It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, to repurpose an old Winston Churchill line dating from the time he confronted the Iron Curtain surrounding Stalin’s thoughts.

Launched by industry legend Art Levinson of Genentech fame, with the infinitely deep pockets of Google for support, one of the few big headlines the anti-aging biotech has sparked focused on a major alliance with AbbVie — a giant outfit that conversely likes to show off its drug prospects whenever it can. Together, they’ve been focused on diseases that limit life span — quite an arc of ailments.

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As catalysts go, few loom larger than the aducanumab adcomm slated for Nov. 6.

With its big franchise under assault, Biogen is betting the ranch that its mixed late-stage Alzheimer’s data can squeak past the experts and regulators and get onto the market. And the topic — after a decade of Alzheimer’s R&D disasters in what still represents the El Dorado of drug markets — remains in the center ring of discussions around late-stage pipeline prospects.

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After nearly a year of public advocacy and often rancorous ethical debate, human challenge trials for Covid-19 vaccines are getting off the ground in London.

The UK government’s Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce and the contract research firm Open Orphan announced today £10 million ($13 million) plan to test experimental Covid-19 vaccines in volunteers whintentionally exposed to the novel coronavirus. The studies, which won’t launch until early 2021, come after 9 months of debate over whether such studies were safe and would actually hasten vaccine development, and they follow a long history of researchers using challenge models to study other respiratory viruses, including flu and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold.

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With plans afoot to file an NDA for what could be its first approved drug, Cara Therapeutics is pivoting its focus to commercialization. And Swiss company Vifor Pharma is willing to surrender up to $440 million to market the candidate in the US.

Cara $CARA CEO Derek Chalmers said an NDA submission is coming this quarter for their intravenous drug Korsuva in chronic kidney disease-associated pruritus (CKD-aP), a severe itching condition. The Stamford, CT-based biotech read out positive topline data from a Phase III pivotal study back in April, and announced plans to approach EMA regulators shortly after filing with the FDA.

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The bad news keeps stacking up at Galapagos — which quite likely just lost control of a billion-dollar deal — and by extension their close partners at Gilead.

The biotech $GLPG reported after the bell Thursday that GLPG1972, one of their top development programs, flat failed a mid-stage study for osteoarthritis, flunking the primary and all secondary endpoints.

Testing 3 different doses of their drug, which relies on ADAMTS-5 inhibition, investigators concluded that none of them triggered a statistically significant response — as measured by cartilage thickness.

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With a medley of adverse events hobbling the late-stage development of vaccines and drugs, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s latest — extended — timeline for the mRNA approach they’re working on with BioNTech is giving some top analysts added confidence that the pharma giant can come up with the regulatory goods next month.

Parsing Bourla’s language in his comments last week, SVB Leerink’s Geoffrey Porges notes that Bourla’s decision to say they “may” be able to nail down the positive efficacy of their vaccine in a matter of days — a big change from his earlier certainty — may also indicate a delay on that to early November.

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