Astel­las is high­light­ing the peo­ple be­hind its on­col­o­gy ef­forts with its lat­est cor­po­rate cam­paign. The “Change­mak­ers” fea­tures some of the re­al Astel­las On­col­o­gy em­ploy­ee sci­en­tists, re­searchers and busi­ness peo­ple talk­ing about their pas­sions and rea­sons for do­ing what they do.

The three-part video se­ries is shot in stark black-and-white video with the on­ly col­or a con­nect­ing red mul­ti-line thread run­ning through the scenes be­tween peo­ple and thoughts — some­times very per­son­al ones. Se­nior di­rec­tor of US med­ical af­fairs Stephanie Braun talks about her moth­er who was di­ag­nosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) at the time she hap­pened to be work­ing in that area. She talks about her moth­er’s treat­ments that gave her time with fam­i­ly and more mile­stones af­ter she was di­ag­nosed.

“Hav­ing that per­son­al con­nec­tion, I think helps me to re­late to the health­care providers that we work with who are touched, ob­vi­ous­ly, by can­cer every sin­gle day,” she says in the sec­ond video.

Ge­off Towle

Ge­off Towle, Astel­las’ VP, on­col­o­gy said the “Change­mak­ers” do­cuseries de­buted ear­li­er this year, with con­tin­ued air­ings this fall, as part of Astel­las On­col­o­gy’s big­ger um­brel­la “Chang­ing the Course” ef­fort.

Astel­las is fo­cus­ing on physi­cians and health­care providers with the mes­sages to not on­ly show it un­der­stands the com­plex­i­ty of care and treat­ment, but al­so that it’s com­mit­ted to part­ner­ing with them to “change the course for the bet­ter,” he said.

“Health­care providers are at the front­line of pa­tient care and they, and the pa­tients, are re­al­ly our in­spi­ra­tion in this,” Towle said. “The videos are about help­ing ex­plain there is a world class team here at Astel­las and folks who are all com­mit­ted to this mis­sion and bring that com­mit­ment to life with their sto­ries.”

The cam­paign is run­ning on so­cial me­dia, in­clud­ing Twit­ter, Face­book and LinkedIn, with al­ready about one mil­lion video views across the chan­nels, he said. The three videos will con­tin­ue to run through 2022 while Astel­las is cur­rent­ly de­vel­op­ing 2023 plans.

The three dif­fer­ent seg­ments fo­cus on Astel­las’ ded­i­ca­tion to pa­tients, fol­low­ing the sci­ence and al­so bring­ing the pa­tient ex­pe­ri­ence to life with one em­ploy­ee who has been through can­cer her­self.

“I be­lieve that Astel­las was able to see can­cer through my eyes. I felt it. It gave me the abil­i­ty to get through this jour­ney, the med­ical jour­ney side of it, and feel sup­port­ed and em­pow­ered to move for­ward,” says Christa Over­ton who is a se­nior sales rep at Astel­las.

Towle said, “These peo­ple rep­re­sent the dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives and dif­fer­ent func­tions in our or­ga­ni­za­tion – and they al­so have per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al ex­pe­ri­ences that help us bring those themes to life. … It’s been a great op­por­tu­ni­ty to fea­ture a wide cross sec­tion of em­ploy­ees rep­re­sent­ing the rest of us.”

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all current vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

The vote marks an effort to clear up confusion around varying formulations and dosing schedules for current primary series and booster vaccines, as well as “get closer to the strains that are circulating,” according to committee member Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The CDMO arm of one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates has posted its year-end results and plans for 2023, which include new construction.

Samsung Biologics netted north of KRW 3 trillion ($2.4 billion) in 2022 revenue and an operating profit of KRW 983.6 billion ($799 million), which the company touted on Friday as “record-high earnings.” The revenue boost was 55% compared to 2021.

Novartis’ sickle cell drug, approved in 2019 and branded as Adakveo, has failed an ongoing Phase III, according to preliminary results.

The Swiss pharma giant unveiled early data from the ongoing STAND Phase III study on Friday, saying that crizanlizumab showed no statistically significant difference between the drug at two different dose levels compared to placebo in annualized rates of vaso-occlusive crises that lead to a healthcare visit over the first year since being randomized into the trial.