A closely watched “breakthrough” asthma drug has hit all the right notes in a Phase III, AstraZeneca and Amgen say, paving the way to reach a currently untapped patient population.

We’re not getting much beyond the announcement that tezepelumab met the primary endpoint, but execs’ enthusiastic comments suggest that what they’re seeing backs up the “unprecedented” results that cemented their FDA breakthrough designation.

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Not 24 hours after earning the first ALS drug approval in five years, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals’ Relyvrio is already drawing scrutiny. And it’s coming from multiple fronts.

In an investor call Friday morning, Amylyx revealed that it would charge about $158,000 per year, a price point that immediately drew backlash from ALS advocates and some outside observers. The cost reveal had been highly anticipated in the immediate hours after Thursday evening’s approval, though Amylyx only teased Relyvrio would cost less than previously approved drugs.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

After brief stops in Paris and Boston, John Carroll and the Endpoints crew are staying on the road in October with their return for a live/streaming EUBIO22 in London. The hybrid event fireside chats and panels on mRNA, oncology and the crazy public market. We hope you can join him there.

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For just the third time in its 116-year history, the FDA has approved a new treatment for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS.

US regulators gave the thumbs-up to the drug, known as Relyvrio, in a massive win for patients and their families. The approval, given to Boston-area biotech Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, comes after two years of long and contentious debates over the drug’s effectiveness between advocacy groups and FDA scientists, following the readout of a mid-stage clinical trial in September 2020.

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Weeks after uncorking some mostly positive data for patisiran in transthyretin-mediated (ATTR) amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, Alnylam is bolstering its package with new exploratory and subgroup data before shipping it off to regulators.

The RNAi drug maintained “generally consistent” benefits in efficacy and quality of life across several prespecified subgroups at month 12, Alnylam announced on Friday afternoon, including age, baseline tafamidis use, ATTR amyloidosis type, baseline six-minute walk test score and others.

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CHICAGO — While the later-stage drug developers in the geographic atrophy field are near the finish line, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen is taking a more deliberate route, with a treatment that it hopes to be a one-time fix.

The Big Pharma will take its Hemera Biosciences-acquired gene therapy into a Phase II study later this year in patients with GA, a common form of age-related macular degeneration that impacts about five million people worldwide. To get there, Janssen touted early-stage safety data at the American Academy of Ophthalmology annual conference Saturday morning, half a day after competitors Apellis and Iveric Bio revealed their own more-detailed Phase III analyses.

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Intercept Pharmaceuticals has run into another big setback in its yearslong quest to win an approval for OCA in NASH. The biotech put out word Friday morning that its Phase III REVERSE study failed the primary endpoint for the liver disease, sending its share price into a tailspin.

There was no significant improvement in fibrosis among the patients suffering from cirrhosis who were treated with obeticholic acid, with investigators hunting for a minimum 1-stage histological improvement in the disease after 18 months of therapy.

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CHICAGO — While its competitor is on the cusp of likely securing the first FDA nod, Iveric Bio is trudging ahead with its potential treatment for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of AMD, and has new data to support its upcoming NDA filing.

The biotech said its drug was more favorable than sham across all subgroups in the second Phase III study of the investigational complement C5 protein inhibitor, performing similarly to a previous, smaller late-stage trial.

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CHICAGO — Eight weeks before patients and industry find out if the FDA approves the first treatment for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, the biotech behind the drug is out with some new data on a secondary endpoint.

In what study investigator Charles Wykoff called the “first direct evidence of function preservation by slowing GA growth” in an investigational treatment, Apellis Pharmaceuticals’ drug pegcetacoplan led to less loss of retinal sensitivity versus sham  within 250 microns on either side of the GA lesion over 24 months.

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