For years, sci­en­tists have looked to curb ag­ing and chron­ic dis­eases by clear­ing de­funct cells with ir­repara­ble dam­age, al­so known as senes­cent cells. Drug­mak­ers like Bris­tol My­ers Squibb and Uni­ty Biotech­nol­o­gy have toiled over senolyt­ics to kill the stub­born cells. So when Robin Man­sukhani was told it could be done us­ing reawak­ened im­mune cells, he was in­trigued.

Senes­cence serves a pro­tec­tive func­tion. It oc­curs when cells are too dam­aged to keep di­vid­ing — for ex­am­ple, if they de­vel­op a can­cer­ous mu­ta­tion. But senes­cent cells al­so con­tribute to ag­ing and oth­er dis­eases, emit­ting tox­ic mol­e­cules that cause in­flam­ma­tion and tis­sue dam­age.

Anil Bhushan

Back in 2018, Man­sukhani was in­tro­duced to Anil Bhushan, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, who was work­ing on a way to weaponize in­vari­ant Nat­ur­al Killer T (iNKT) cells against senes­cent cells to treat type 1 di­a­betes. iNKT cells act as a sort of sur­veil­lance sys­tem, elim­i­nat­ing for­eign cells, but be­come less ac­tive with age and oth­er fac­tors.

“I fol­lowed senes­cence for a long time, but I nev­er ever thought about it in the con­text of type 1 di­a­betes. So that da­ta just kind of knocked me aside,” Man­sukhani said.

He did his own re­search, then about six weeks lat­er teamed up with Bhushan to launch De­cid­u­ous Ther­a­peu­tics. While the team is no longer go­ing af­ter di­a­betes, they pub­lished a pa­per on Mon­day in Med link­ing in vi­vo iNKT cells with clear­ing senes­cent cells.

“These cells have long been of in­ter­est to peo­ple — they just, you know, haven’t re­al­ly fig­ured out what to do with them or what they re­al­ly do,” Man­sukhani, now CEO, said. “There was some­thing in the senes­cent cell that said, OK, there’s a foot­print here to an im­mune cell that’s go­ing to talk to this senes­cent cell and clear it out. And that’s where things get ex­cit­ing.”

iNK­Ts have two main at­trib­ut­es that make them an ap­peal­ing tar­get, Man­sukhani ex­plained. First, they have the same re­cep­tor, which doesn’t ap­pear on any oth­er cell in the body, al­low­ing a high lev­el of speci­fici­ty. And they al­so op­er­ate in a nat­ur­al neg­a­tive feed­back loop, that re­turns them to dor­man­cy af­ter a pe­ri­od of ac­tiv­i­ty.

“Us­ing iNKT-tar­get­ed ther­a­py can pig­gy­back on their ex­quis­ite, built-in speci­fici­ty,” Bhushan said in a state­ment.

Us­ing the ap­proach, the sci­en­tists were able to im­prove blood glu­cose lev­els in mice with di­et-in­duced obe­si­ty, and ex­tend the lives of mice with lung fi­bro­sis. Go­ing forth, Man­sukhani said the team is go­ing to look at things like chron­ic kid­ney dis­ease and car­diac fi­bro­sis. He ex­pects to hit the clin­ic in mid-to-late 2023.

“The ra­tio­nale here was that, if this hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly in the body by the im­mune sys­tem, let’s just go back and un­der­stand that first, and then we can fig­ure out what to do with that in­for­ma­tion once we ac­tu­al­ly un­der­stand that un­der­ly­ing first prin­ci­ple,” he said.

The EMA is putting EU member states on alert over the shortage of two drugs that counter heart attacks due to an uptick in demand.

On Friday, the EMA sent out a warning that two Boehringer Ingelheim drugs are experiencing a shortage: Actilyse and Metalyse. The drugs are used as emergency treatments for adults experiencing acute myocardial infarction, or a heart attack, by dissolving blood clots that have formed in the blood vessels.

Fujifilm’s CDMO arm, Fujifilm Diosynth, has been on a roll this month as the company has recently broken ground on a major project in Europe and it appears to be keeping up the momentum.

Fujifilm Diosynth announced that it has kicked off an expansion project for its microbial manufacturing facility at its campus in the town of Billingham, UK, in the northeast of England.

The 20,000 square-foot, £400 million ($435 million) expansion will add clean rooms, purification suites and a packing area along with more space for the manufacturing itself.

Back in April, Amgen said it was encouraged by the solicitor general’s anticipated review of its Supreme Court petition to rehear a Repatha patent case. They’re likely much less optimistic about the outcome now.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a recent 27-page brief that Amgen’s arguments “lack merit and further review is not warranted.”

The case traces back to a suit filed in 2014 against Sanofi and Regeneron’s Praluent, which ended up beating Amgen’s PCSK9 blockbuster Repatha to market by a month just a year later.

At Klick Health’s first Ideas Exchange conference with biotech and pharma industry insiders since before the pandemic began, it was no surprise many conversations included Covid topics. Yet while vaccines and treatments were discussed, so too were the effects on drug development, federal responses, health inequities — and what to do now and next.

George Yancopoulos, chief scientist and cofounder of Regeneron, opened the conference responding to a question from Acorda CEO Ron Cohen about the spotlight on the industry during Covid and some of the “flak” biopharma has taken in the past.