→ As­traZeneca has won a pri­or­i­ty re­view for its an­ti-CD22 ther­a­py mox­e­tu­momab for hairy cell leukemia. The phar­ma gi­ant can now ex­pect a de­ci­sion on third-line use in the third quar­ter, mark­ing an­oth­er prospec­tive ad­vance for its crit­i­cal­ly im­por­tant on­col­o­gy pipeline.

→ With ma­jor help from Fra­zier Health­care Part­ners, a stealthy gene ther­a­py com­pa­ny from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia has se­cured $9.29 mil­lion in in­vest­ment. Gene ther­a­py pi­o­neer James Wil­son co-reg­is­tered the com­pa­ny in 2016, the Philadel­phia In­quir­er notes, but has since been re­placed on the board by Penn med­ical school vice dean Kevin Ma­honey. Kr­ish­na Polu, a for­mer Cy­tomX chief med­ical of­fi­cer who joined Fra­zier as an en­tre­pre­neur in res­i­dence, is the CEO. Sev­er­al Fra­zier ex­ecs, in­clud­ing Patrick Heron and Tadata­ka Tama­da, are al­so on the board.

→ Switzer­land’s Glycemi­con an­nounced to­day that af­ter a sec­ond clos­ing, it has raised a to­tal of $5.28 mil­lion (CHF 5.05 mil­lion) to ad­vance cat and hu­man stud­ies of its neu­traceu­ti­cals. The biotech is de­vel­op­ing a pipeline of nov­el food prod­ucts that man­ages pre­di­a­betes, the “gray area” be­tween nor­mal blood sug­ar lev­els and di­a­betes, as well as weight.

Another big drug approval came through on Friday afternoon as the FDA OK’d AbbVie’s upadacitinib — an oral JAK1 inhibitor that is hitting the rheumatoid arthritis market with a black box warning of serious malignancies, infections and thrombosis reflecting fears associated with the class.

It will be sold as Rinvoq — at a wholesale price of $59,000 a year — and will likely soon face competition from a drug that AbbVie once controlled, and spurned. Reuters reports that a 4-week supply of Humira, by comparison, is $5,174, adding up to about $67,000 a year.

After a “hot” period of rapid growth between 2009 and 2012, and a relatively “cooler” period of slower growth from 2013 to 2015, China has once again become a top-of-mind priority for the CEOs of most large, multinational pharmaceutical companies.

At the International Pharma Forum, hosted in March in Beijing by the R&D Based Pharmaceutical Association Committee (RDPAC) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), no fewer than seven CEOs of major multinational pharmaceutical firms participated, including GSK, Eli Lilly, LEO Pharma, Merck KGaA, Pfizer, Sanofi and UCB. A few days earlier, the CEOs of several other large multinationals attended the China Development Forum, an annual business forum hosted by the research arm of China’s State Council. It’s hard to imagine any other country, except the US, having such drawing power at CEO level.

ICER has some strong words for PTC, Sarepta and the FDA as the US drug price watchdog concludes that as currently priced, their respective new treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy are decidedly not cost-effective.

The final report — which cements the conclusions of a draft issued in May — incorporates the opinion of a panel of 17 experts ICER convened in a public meeting last month. It also based its analysis of Emflaza (deflazacort) and Exondys 51 (eteplirsen) on updated annual costs of $81,400 and over $1 million, respectively, after citing “incorrect” lower numbers in the initial calculations.