Weeks after GSK widened the market for PARP inhibitor Zejula in patients with ovarian cancer, rival AstraZeneca’s market-leading Lynparza has also secured expanded use in women with the disease.

Lynparza, in combination with Roche’s Avastin, has been approved by the FDA for the maintenance treatment of adult patients with advanced epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube or primary peritoneal cancer who have experienced a complete or partial response to first-line platinum-based chemotherapy and whose disease is associated with homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) positive status, defined by either a BRCA mutation and/or genomic instability. Roughly one in two women with advanced ovarian cancer has an HRD+ tumor.

GSK has vastly expanded its market for cancer therapy Zejula — the crown jewel at the heart of its $5 billion acquisition of Tesaro — by winning FDA approval for the drug in a large subset of patients with ovarian cancer.

The approval comes for women with advanced epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal cancer who experienced a complete or partial response to first-line platinum-based chemotherapy — accounting for approximately 80% of all ovarian cancer patients.

Earlier this month, Reshma Kewalramani took over the reins as Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CEO — she will now be tasked with grappling with criticism from cost-effectiveness watchdog ICER, which on Monday issued a report suggesting that despite the health gains offered by its suite of cystic fibrosis drugs, their prices are far too high to be sustainable for patients and health care systems.

“Despite being transformative therapies, the prices set by the manufacturer – costing many millions of dollars over the lifetime of an average patient – are out of proportion to their substantial benefits,” said David Rind, ICER’s chief medical officer in a statement.

Takeda is $670 million closer to its goal of selling off $10 billion in assets to help pay for the Shire buyout.

The pharma giant reported Friday that it has sold off a portfolio of drugs and a pair of European manufacturing sites to Denmark’s Orifarm Group. The latest in a string of auctions, capped by the $5.3 billion sale of Xiidra to Novartis, Takeda has been systematically auctioning off bits of the company to pay down debt built in the acquisition.

In 2004, the Swiss Stock Exchange spawned its biotech index — the Swiss Bio+Medtech Index (SXI) — as the life sciences sector, headlined by large successful biopharma companies Roche and Novartis, took center stage. In the last five years through January 2020, SXI has produced returns of 59%, outperforming both the Swiss Performance Index (31%) and the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index (35%), a new analysis shows.

A turbulent 16 months for Immunomedics has ended in a potential blockbuster approval, as the FDA granted an accelerated OK for their drug to treat an aggressive form of breast cancer.

The drug, branded as Trodelvy, is approved for metastatic triple negative breast cancer — breast cancers that lack the oncogenes that targeted therapies go after and that have helped make the disease treatable for some patients. The drug, which had breakthrough status and priority review, showed a 33% response and median duration of response of 7.7 months in 108 patients enrolled in their Phase II trial. Peak sales estimates can range as high as around $3 billion.

AbbVie and J&J’s market-leading Imbruvica, the original BTK inhibitor, continues to rake in approvals, while competition in the class of drugs heats up.

On Tuesday, the drug secured its 11th FDA approval. Imbruvica in combination with Roche’s rituximab has been sanctioned for use as the first line of defense in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL).