Mount­ing a pre­lim­i­nary ef­fort to catch up with oth­er phar­ma gi­ants in the on­colyt­ic virus space, As­traZeneca has found a part­ner in France’s Trans­gene.

In the deal, the biotech — which is al­ready al­lied with Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb and Pfiz­er/Mer­ck KGaA on com­bi­na­tion pro­grams with its in-house ther­a­peu­tic vac­cines — will come up with five new armed on­colyt­ic vac­cinia virus can­di­dates. As­traZeneca is start­ing small with $10 mil­lion up­front and just $3 mil­lion in pre­clin­i­cal suc­cess mile­stones, but promis­es an undis­closed li­cense fee for each clin­i­cal can­di­date they ul­ti­mate­ly de­cide to co-de­vel­op.

Jean-Charles So­ria

The phar­ma gi­ant $AZN will al­so be able to choose the trans­genes to be en­cod­ed with­in the virus, a key ad­di­tion that pro­vides added fire­pow­er to the im­mune sys­tem against the tu­mor.

Long rec­og­nized as a tool to di­rect­ly kill can­cer cells, on­colyt­ic virus­es gained trac­tion in re­cent years af­ter re­search sug­gests that by burst­ing can­cer cells and re­leas­ing anti­gens with­in, they can al­so trig­ger an im­mune re­sponse. That makes them a po­tent im­munother­a­pies on its own as well as an ide­al pair­ing agent for the next gen­er­a­tion of I/O com­bos.

As­traZeneca first got its hands on an on­colyt­ic virus in 2015 when it inked a li­cens­ing agree­ment with Om­nis Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (now Vyr­i­ad), but it told Bio­Cen­tu­ry that “there are cur­rent­ly no on­go­ing AZ-spon­sored clin­i­cal tri­als of the can­di­date.”

Jean-Charles So­ria, SVP of As­traZeneca’s new­ly named on­col­o­gy unit, added they have “an ex­cit­ing port­fo­lio of mol­e­cules that we be­lieve may aug­ment on­colyt­ic virus ac­tiv­i­ty.”

Oth­er big play­ers such as Mer­ck, J&J, Pfiz­er and Boehringer have each bagged or seed­ed their own on­colyt­ic virus projects on the foot­steps of Am­gen’s T Vec, along­side biotech play­ers like PsiOxus, un­der­scor­ing the mo­men­tum of the next wave.

Mean­while, Trans­gene will con­tin­ue plough­ing on its in-house pipeline and promis­es to send a few more drugs to the clin­ic in 2020.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”