Neurotrope this week joined the long line of biopharma companies that have been mauled by clinical failure for Alzheimer’s drugs. But their crushed shares ($NTRP down from more than $8 in June to penny stock range today) represented just a tiny drop in the bucket of red ink that has drained from players which have pursued the greatest of all Holy Grails in drug R&D. Decades of defeat, headlined by the likes of solanezumab at Eli Lilly stretching to the most recent snafu with Biogen’s aducanumab, have forced a slew of players to change course on their R&D strategy — or just leave it in limbo.

Whenever a clinical trial team starts touting the “totality” of the data, you know they’re in trouble.

For Novartis’ Entresto (sacubitril/valsartan) team, that’s the early go-to position on their latest round of pivotal data for the blockbuster — which the pharma giant believes has megablockbuster potential. We already knew that Novartis’ team plans to field the drug to regulators in search of a label extension — but now we have a better idea of the hurdles it faces. 

Earlier this week we got a look at Senator Kamala Harris’ position on drug prices. She’s proposing that HHS take an average price from single-payer systems like the UK, Germany and Canada — which leverage market access for lower prices — and use that to set the US price. Anything drug companies collect above that would be taxed at a rate of 100%.

And the rhetoric is scathing:
While families struggle to make it to the end of the month, pharmaceutical companies are turning record profits. They’re spending nearly as much on advertising as R&D. They’re manipulating their market power to hike prices on lifesaving generic drugs. They’re making twice the profit of the average industry in America and still increased drug prices by 10.5% over the past six months alone. Meanwhile, they are charging dramatically higher prices to American consumers.
That’s an escalation on Joe Biden’s plan, which includes drug importation from those cheaper markets as well as allowing Medicare to negotiate prices — something that virtually all Dems agree on now.

The Washington Post managed to whip up the quickest industry consensus I’ve ever seen that one of its reporters was purveying overblown nonsense with a story that Pfizer was sitting on data suggesting that Enbrel could be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s. 

In covering that bit of anti-Big Pharma fantasy — there are lots of reasons to go after pharma, but this piece was ludicrous — I noted comments in the story from some prominent people in the field criticizing Pfizer for not publishing the data. I singled out Rudy Tanzi at Harvard and then applied some added criticism for the things he’s done to hype — in my opinion — highly questionable assumptions. You can see it in the link.