Less than a year af­ter scor­ing a fast FDA OK for its pi­o­neer­ing acute myeloid leukemia drug gilter­i­tinib, Astel­las has snapped up a pos­i­tive rec­om­men­da­tion from Eu­ro­pean reg­u­la­tors fol­low­ing an ac­cel­er­at­ed as­sess­ment.

The CHMP thumbs up widens the gap be­tween Astel­las and Dai­ichi Sankyo, which has run in­to a road­block at the FDA when try­ing to field its own FLT3 tar­get­ed ther­a­py af­ter be­ing green-light­ed in Japan.

Dai­ichi’s drug, quizar­tinib, has al­so nabbed speedy re­view at the EMA.

Up to 30% of AML pa­tients have an FLT3 mu­ta­tion, which stim­u­lates the growth of ab­nor­mal leukemia cells. No­var­tis’ Ry­dapt is ap­proved on both sides of the At­lantic to treat the same group in com­bi­na­tion with chemother­a­py.

The mar­ket­ing au­tho­riza­tion for gilter­i­tinib — brand­ed Xospa­ta — will cov­er re­lapsed or re­frac­to­ry cas­es in adults.

So­cial im­age: Astel­las, AP Im­ages

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.

For nearly a decade now, the low-profile Cambridge biotech Kymab has been battling in US, UK, Japanese and Australian courts with the biotech behemoth Regeneron.

Regeneron has turned itself into a $70 billion company off of a platform of transgenically humanized mice they can use to make antibodies for anything from Ebola to colorectal cancer. The technology took decades and billions to build, 20 years from the company’s founding to the first approved drug. And the company guards and touts it zealously, breaking their production process down into various branded components — Velocimmune, Velocigene, Velocimouse and four other Velocis — and sometimes suing would-be copycats. In 2014, most notably, they sued two Pfizer-backed entities for patent infringement.

After pharma partner Novartis boosted its IPO with a $10 million private placement, Pliant Therapeutics has wrapped its journey to the Nasdaq on a high note.

Pliant had penciled in a $86 million raise back in May. But as has become the norm in recent months, that initial number has turned out to be a mere placeholder, making way for the final haul of $144 million.

The South San Francisco biotech did so by pricing at $16, the high end of the range, while bringing the number of shares offered up to 9 million.