Months af­ter Fir­dapse mak­er Cat­a­lyst Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals filed a law­suit against the FDA, the Flori­da com­pa­ny on Wednes­day said the drug had failed a piv­otal tri­al in pa­tients af­flict­ed with con­gen­i­tal myas­thenic syn­dromes (CMS), an um­brel­la term for rare neu­ro­mus­cu­lar dis­or­ders com­pris­ing a spec­trum of more than 50 ge­net­ic de­fects.

The drug, known chem­i­cal­ly as am­i­fam­pri­dine, was sanc­tioned for use in adult Lam­bert-Eaton myas­thenic syn­drome (LEMS) pa­tients in No­vem­ber 2018. The com­pa­ny is work­ing on ex­pand­ing the la­bel to in­clude pa­tients with CMS, MuSK-pos­i­tive myas­the­nia gravis (MuSK-MG) and spinal mus­cu­lar at­ro­phy (SMA).

Cat­a­lyst es­ti­mates that there are be­tween 1,000 and 1,500 CMS pa­tients in the Unit­ed States — there are at least 600 fam­i­lies with af­fect­ed in­di­vid­u­als who have been rep­re­sent­ed in sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, ac­cord­ing to the NIH. Pa­tients with CMS car­ry mu­ta­tions in genes en­cod­ing pro­teins es­sen­tial for neu­ro­mus­cu­lar trans­mis­sion.

Cat­a­lyst’s late-stage study test­ed the drug against a place­bo in ge­net­i­cal­ly con­firmed CMS pa­tients. 20 pa­tients aged two and above were en­rolled in the tri­al, and 16 were ran­dom­ized. The drug failed to meet the main goal of sub­ject glob­al im­pres­sion (SGI) scale, a mea­sure used by clin­i­cians to rate the sever­i­ty of the ill­ness at the time of as­sess­ment, rel­a­tive to the clin­i­cian’s past ex­pe­ri­ence with pa­tients with the same di­ag­no­sis.

The com­pa­ny’s shares $CPRX slipped about 12.3% to $5 in pre­mar­ket trad­ing.

The sec­ondary end­point of mus­cle func­tion mea­sure (MFM) across all test­ed sub­types was al­so not met, al­though in­di­vid­ual pa­tient im­prove­ments were ob­served in some pa­tient sub-groups, the com­pa­ny said.

“Due to the small pa­tient preva­lence, the low num­ber of pa­tients test­ed, and het­ero­gene­ity of the dis­ease with a wide range of vari­a­tion in clin­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion across its more than 50 sub­types, it was chal­leng­ing to demon­strate a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fit across mul­ti­ple sub­types,” Steven Miller, Cat­a­lyst’s COO and CSO said in a state­ment.

The com­pa­ny will meet the FDA be­fore the end of 2019 to fig­ure out the next steps for the CMA pro­gram. Mean­while, the Cat­a­lyst ex­pects to re­port da­ta from the MuSK-MG tri­al as well as re­sults from its SMA proof of con­cept study in the first half of next year.

Hav­ing launched in Jan­u­ary, Fir­dapse gen­er­at­ed about $41.3 mil­lion in sales in the first half of this year. Be­fore the drug (which car­ries an av­er­age an­nu­al list price of $375,000) was ap­proved by the FDA, hun­dreds of pa­tients had been able to ac­cess a sim­i­lar drug from com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies for a frac­tion of the cost, or Ja­cobus’ for free, as part of an FDA-rat­i­fied com­pas­sion­ate use pro­gram.

But the ap­proval of the Cat­a­lyst drug — ac­com­pa­nied by mar­ket ex­clu­siv­i­ty span­ning sev­en years — ef­fec­tive­ly pre­clud­ed Ja­cobus and com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies from sell­ing their ver­sions.

Then, in an un­ex­pect­ed twist, the FDA en­dorsed New Jer­sey-based Ja­cobus’ ver­sion in pe­di­atric pa­tients, on the ba­sis of adult da­ta — a move that could spark off-la­bel pre­scrip­tion in adults (As far as the FDA is con­cerned, doc­tors can pre­scribe drugs for off-la­bel use when they judge that it is med­ical­ly ap­pro­pri­ate for their pa­tient). Adding fu­el to the fire, Ja­cobus’s drug, Ruzur­gi, car­ries a list price that is less than half of Fir­dapse’s. Cat­a­lyst main­tains that typ­i­cal­ly, cov­ered pa­tients pay less than $10 per month out-of-pock­et.

In an in­ter­view with End­points News ahead of Cat­a­lyst’s third-quar­ter re­sults ex­pect­ed mid-No­vem­ber, chief Patrick McE­nany said that the Ruzur­gi ap­proval has trig­gered a “trick­le of ero­sion” on its LEMS pa­tient base. “It was not un­ex­pect­ed,” he said.

In June, Cat­a­lyst filed a law­suit against the health reg­u­la­tor — ef­fec­tive­ly ac­cus­ing the agency of bow­ing to po­lit­i­cal pres­sure sur­round­ing sky­rock­et­ing drug prices. Un­der fed­er­al law, the agency is meant to treat all com­pa­nies in the same man­ner. Cat­a­lyst has as­sert­ed the agency un­der­mined its or­phan drug ex­clu­siv­i­ty, and vi­o­lat­ed fed­er­al law by play­ing fa­vorites in the con­text of a hy­per­vig­i­lant pric­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

J&J has zeroed in on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate that it hopes to begin testing in humans by September this year — with the extraordinary goal of getting it ready for emergency use in early 2021. And together with BARDA, it’s committing $1 billion to make it happen.

That kind of accelerated timeline would fall on the fast side of NIAID director Anthony Fauci’s well-publicized prediction that it would be another 12 to 18 months before a vaccine can be available for public use. A Phase I trial of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine began two weeks ago, and both the biotech and fellow mRNA player CureVac have discussed similar, if not even faster, timelines for emergency use among healthcare workers.

Using lab-grown proteins that are engineered to mimic the architecture of viruses to induce an immune response, VBI Vaccines is joining the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine — harnessing technology that has initially been proved safe in early trials as a prophylactic for cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection.

Unlike the raft of the companies in the Covid-19 vaccine race — including Moderna, CureVac and J&J — VBI is taking a pan-coronavirus approach, by developing a vaccine that will encompass Covid-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

VCs love few things more than a proven executive team when it comes to launching a new company. And now a group of A-listers has turned to a pair of top execs out of AveXis to steer the latest gene therapy player into the clinic.

The biotech is Waltham, MA-based Affinia and the two execs are Sean Nolan and Rick Modi — the former CEO and CBO respectively of AveXis, the gene therapy pioneer that fetched $8.7 billion in a sale to Novartis. Nolan has now taken the chairman’s role at Affinia while Modi moves up to the CEO post at the company.

When Pieter van der Meer started raising the capital for Gilde Healthcare’s fifth fund in the waning months of 2019, he had his eyes on a different chain of events that could change the healthcare system and perhaps even play to his firm’s advantage: The US presidential election.

Since raising their third fund in 2011, the 34-year-old Dutch firm had focused on value-based care. They chose late-stage biotechs that came up with new devices and delivery systems for de-risked established compounds, and when they chose preclinical biotechs, they spoke with potential pharma partners, payers and regulators to ask where and at what prices the drug made sense. As the Democratic primary became a contest over how to lower healthcare costs, it looked like a strategy that could pay off.