Four months after the critical failure of a closely-watched Phase III study, Sage Therapeutics is bringing out the ax to execute a major restructuring.

Out go 340 staffers, slightly more than half of the workforce at the biotech. Most of those job cuts are being focused on their Zulresso (brexanolone) CIV injection commercial operation and “related SG&A support functions.”

The company $SAGE is circling the wagons around existing sites where they dose Zulresso, abandoning any plans to expand while essentially relegating the therapy to novelty status. Mizuho reduced its peak sales estimate to $20 million. And Sage is doubling down on their failed depression drug, where the real upside lay.

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When Roche spelled out its original $1 billion deal — $45 million of that upfront — with Blueprint to discover targeted therapies against immunokinases, the biotech partner’s RET program was still preclinical. Four years later, pralsetinib is on the cusp of potential approval and the Swiss pharma giant is putting in much more to get in on the commercial game.

Roche gains rights to co-develop and co-commercialize the drug, with sole marketing responsibility for places outside the US and China (where CStone has staked its claim).

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For two months in late winter and early spring, Anthony Fauci and President Trump stood in uneasy co-existence at White House briefings — an unlikely truce between an infectious disease official who had helped combat AIDS and Ebola and a president who repeatedly denied the danger of a virus that would go on to kill 100,000 Americans, repeatedly rejected masks and certain social distancing efforts, and promoted a drug with little scientific basis.

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Almost as soon as CAR-T emerged in the mid-2010s as a near-cure for some cancers, so did a question: How do you give this without risking killing patients?

At the time, James Patterson was wrapping an MD-PhD at a yeast lab at London’s Francis Crick Institute. Yeast may seem an unlikely place to find a fix for cancer therapy, but reading through other researchers’ solutions to CAR-T’s toxicity, Patterson wondered if a method long used by yeast biologists called auxotrophy might be useful. You genetically modify cells to make them dependent on a particular nutrient. Then you can make them live or die — proliferate or deplete — by giving or taking away that nutrient.

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After reported disputes between company officials and government scientists delayed a much-anticipated Phase III trial, Moderna has set a start date for the 30,000-person study that will determine whether its vaccine can actually protect people from developing Covid-19.

The study will start on July 27th, according to clinicaltrials.gov, in line with Moderna’s promise of a July launch but a bit more than 2 weeks after the July 10 date Reuters reported the trial was originally supposed to start. Conducted in collaboration with the NIH and BARDA, the trial will inoculate volunteers with placebo or mRNA-1273 at 87 sites across the country.

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