Banking on hope, swayed by hype? Hydroxychloroquine in the time of Covid-19
Natalie Grover
Reporter
As coronavirus deaths amassed and already stretched health care systems in Europe, and the United States groaned with the added weight of the pandemic, the FDA and EMA agencies adopted contradictory tones over the use of a pair of decades-old malaria drugs to fight the virus — epitomizing the desperation to combat an uncharted disease.
“This is just another example that points to the fact that while EMA and FDA oftentimes take the same position, they also take contrary positions,” said Peter Pitts, who served as the FDA’s associate commissioner for external relations between 2002 and 2004. “We are addressing Covid-19 in a variety of ways, and so is the EMA — the circles are concentric, but they are not identical.”
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April 12, 2021 06:00 AM EDT
BYOD Best Practices: How Mobile Device Strategy Leads to More Patient-Centric Clinical Trials
Jonathan Andrus
Chief Business Officer, Clinical Ink
Some of the most time- and cost-consuming components of clinical research center on gathering, analyzing, and reporting data. To improve efficiency, many clinical trial sponsors have shifted to electronic clinical outcome assessments (eCOA), including electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) tools.
In most cases, patients enter data using apps installed on provisioned devices. At a time when 81% of Americans own a smartphone, why not use the device they rely on every day?
Eli Lilly asks FDA to revoke EUA for Covid-19 treatment
Zachary Brennan
Senior Editor
Eli Lilly on Friday requested that the FDA revoke the emergency authorization for its Covid-19 drug bamlanivimab, which is no longer as effective as a combo therapy because of a rise in coronavirus variants across the US.
“With the growing prevalence of variants in the U.S. that bamlanivimab alone may not fully neutralize, and with sufficient supply of etesevimab, we believe now is the right time to complete our planned transition and focus on the administration of these two neutralizing antibodies together,” Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s CSO, said in a statement.
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Exclusive interview: Peter Marks on why full Covid-19 vaccine approvals could be just months away
Zachary Brennan
Senior Editor
Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, took time out of his busy schedule last Friday to discuss with Endpoints News all things related to his work regulating vaccines and the pandemic.
Marks, who quietly coined the name “Operation Warp Speed” before deciding to stick with his work regulating vaccines at the FDA rather than join the Trump-era program, has been the face of vaccine regulation for the FDA throughout the pandemic, and is usually spotted in Zoom meetings seated in front of his wife’s paintings.
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J&J faces CDC advisory committee again next week to weigh Covid-19 vaccine risks
Zachary Brennan
Senior Editor
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices punted earlier this week on deciding whether or not to recommend lifting a pause on the administration of J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine, but the committee will meet again in an emergency session next Friday to discuss the safety issues further.
The timing of the meeting likely means that the J&J vaccine will not return to the US market before the end of next week as the FDA looks to work hand-in-hand with the CDC to ensure the benefits of the vaccine still outweigh the risks for all age groups.
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Nearly a year after Audentes' gene therapy deaths, the trial continues. What happened remains a mystery
Jason Mast
Editor
Natalie Holles was five months into her tenure as Audentes CEO and working to smooth out a $3 billion merger when the world crashed in.
Holles and her team received word on the morning of May 5 that, hours before, a patient died in a trial for their lead gene therapy. They went into triage mode, alerting the FDA, calling trial investigators to begin to understand what happened, and, the next day, writing a letter to alert the patient community so they would be the first to know. “We wanted to be as forthright and transparent as possible,” Holles told me late last month.
The brief letter noted two other patients also suffered severe reactions after receiving a high dose of the therapy and were undergoing treatment. One died a month and a half later, at which point news of the deaths became public, jolting an emergent gene therapy field and raising questions about the safety of the high doses Audentes and others were now using. The third patient died in August.
“It was deeply saddening,” Holles said. “But I was — we were — resolute and determined to understand what happened and learn from it and get back on track.”
Eleven months have now passed since the first death and the therapy, a potential cure for a rare and fatal muscle-wasting disease called X-linked myotubular myopathy, is back on track, the FDA having cleared the company to resume dosing at a lower level. Audentes itself is no more; last month, Japanese pharma giant Astellas announced it had completed working out the kinks of the $3 billion merger and had restructured and rebranded the subsidiary as Astellas Gene Therapies. Holles, having successfully steered both efforts, departed.
Still, questions about precisely what led to the deaths of the 3 boys still linger. Trial investigators released key details about the case last August and December, pointing to a biological landmine that Audentes could not have seen coming — a moment of profound medical misfortune. In an emerging field that’s promised cures for devastating diseases but also seen its share of safety setbacks, the cases provided a cautionary tale.
Audentes “contributed in a positive way by giving a painful but important example for others to look at and learn from,” Terry Flotte, dean of the UMass School of Medicine and editor of the journal Human Gene Therapy, told me. “I can’t see anything they did wrong.”
Yet some researchers say they’re still waiting on Astellas to release more data. The company has yet to publish a full paper detailing what happened, nor have they indicated that they will. In the meantime, it remains unclear what triggered the events and how to prevent them in the future.
“Since Audentes was the first one and we don’t have additional information, we’re kind of in a holding pattern, flying around, waiting to figure out how to land our vehicles,” said Jude Samulski, professor of pharmacology at UNC’s Gene Therapy Center and CSO of the gene therapy biotech AskBio, now a subsidiary of Bayer.
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Merck scraps their $425M Covid-19 drug in latest pandemic setback
Jason Mast
Editor
Seven months after paying $425 million cash to acquire it, Merck is scrapping a Covid-19 drug they hoped could provide one of the only treatments for severe hospitalized patients.
Merck’s decision comes after they faced significant and unexpected regulatory delays in getting the drug, known as MK-7110 or CD24Fc, across the finish line. The Big Pharma licensed the drug under the belief that it had already shown sufficient benefit in severe patients and they could help scale it up far faster than OncoImmune, its former owner, could. But in February, the company reported that the FDA insisted Merck run a new trial before seeking authorization.
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Covid-19 roundup: Biden invests $1.7B to address Covid variants; EU puts faith in Pfizer with new vaccine deals
Nicole DeFeudis
Associate Editor
Zachary Brennan
Senior Editor
The Biden administration said Friday that it’ll pump $1.7 billion into various programs to address Covid-19 variants as the original strain of Covid-19 makes up only about half of all US cases today.
Most of those new funds, $1 billion in total, will go to expand genomic sequencing so the CDC, states and other jurisdictions can improve their capacity to identify Covid mutations and monitor the circulation of variants. Back in February, US labs were only sequencing about 8,000 Covid-19 strains per week, although the rate of sequencing has increased substantially since then, the administration said.
Osman Kibar lays down his hand at Samumed, stepping away from CEO role as his once-heralded anti-aging biotech rebrands
Nicole DeFeudis
Associate Editor
Samumed made quite the entrance back in 2016, when it launched with some anti-aging programs and a whopping $12 billion valuation. That level of fanfare was nowhere to be found on Thursday, when the company added another $120 million to its coffers and quietly changed its name to Biosplice Therapeutics.
Why the sudden rebrand?
“We did that for obvious reasons,” CFO and CBO Erich Horsley told Endpoints News. “The name Biosplice echoes our science much more than Samumed does.”
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Sponsors should flag decentralized aspects of cancer trials to prep for the post-Covid era, FDA says
Zachary Brennan
Senior Editor
As more and more clinical trials during the pandemic have harnessed the power of remote assessments and modifications, the FDA Oncology Center of Excellence and the Office of Oncologic Diseases are now requesting that applicants voluntarily add flags to datasets to discriminate between remote assessments and trial site assessments.
The push from the FDA to flag these differences is part of an effort to ameliorate the fact that there is currently no standard way to identify Covid-related modifications in clinical trial datasets submitted to the FDA. And many of these remote modifications were deployed in the middle of large ongoing cancer trials as a way to minimize Covid risks, the agency said.