When the FDA spurned Astellas’ pitch for atrial fibrillation drug vernakalant in 2008, regulators made it abundantly clear that it wasn’t the efficacy they had a problem with — two Phase III trials had shown the drug successfully restored 52% of patients’ heartbeat from irregular to normal — but the cardio safety issues for a drug that was to compete with well established, low-risk options. One licensing deal, one clinical hold and several studies later, the chances of approval aren’t looking any better.

A raft of antibiotic makers have crashed and burned recently despite getting their drugs across the finish line. Iterum Therapeutics hopes that its lead drug sulopenem, which has an outpatient focus in addition to hospitals and a plan to target areas with the highest levels of drug-resistant infections, will avert some of those reimbursement challenges. However, the company has now stumbled in a late-stage study, diminishing its shot at FDA approval it first requires.

A day after new Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson staked his reputation and the future of the pharma giant on making Dupixent a megasuccess story, little Leo Pharma is throwing down the gauntlet on atopic dermatitis.

Three years ago Leo paid AstraZeneca $115 million to buy up rights to use tralokinumab against atopic dermatitis — with $1 billion more on the table in milestones — the Danish company says their drug has swept up positive results for all primary and secondary endpoints in three Phase III trials. Now they plan to start the final push for regulatory approvals so they can challenge the heavyweight champions in this slugfest.

Amgen has signed up to be AbbVie’s neighbor in South San Francisco as it moves into a nine-story R&D facility in the booming biotech hub.

The arrangement gives Amgen 240,000 square feet of space on the Gateway of Pacific Campus, just a few minutes drive from its current digs at Oyster Point. The new hub will open in 2022 and house the big biotech’s Bay Area employees working on cardiometabolic, inflammation and oncology research.

Scripps and AbbVie go way back. Research conducted in the lab of Scripps scientist Richard Lerner led to the discovery of Humira. The antibody, approved by the FDA in 2002 and sold by AbbVie, went on to become the world’s bestselling treatment. In 2018, the drugmaker and the non-profit organization signed a pact focused on developing cancer treatments — and now, the scope of that partnership has broadened to encompass a range of diseases, including immunological and neurological conditions.

The biopharma R&D food chain is paying off with a plan at Sanofi to pitch regulators on a new drug for an orphan disease called cold agglutinin disease.

The pharma giant ushered out a statement Tuesday morning — after it spelled out plans to radically restructure the company, abandoning cardio and diabetes research altogether — saying that their C1s inhibitor sutimlimab had cleared the pivotal study.

Inscripta presentations can begin with the advent of agriculture. Or even further back: The emergence of man.

“We’ve come a long way, starting with natural selection,” Inscripta microbial director Nandini Krishnamurthy told a session this year at SynBioBeta, the new annual conference for the synthetic biology field.

Behind her was a slide that’s recurred in company presentations, showing from left to right across the bottom the classic evolution-of-man chart (the ‘humorous’ kind that ends on an overweight soda-drinker), a picture showing the development of corn from thin strand to bulbous Iowan, and then a squiggly protein close-up of “directed evolution.” Below that runs an arrow and a ticker of how long each takes, from 10^9 years to 1.

As J&J attempts to jostle past Bristol-Myers Squibb and bluebird for a landmark approval of its anti-BCMA CAR-T — and while GlaxoSmithKline maps a quick path to the FDA riding on its own BCMA-targeting antibody-drug conjugates — the bispecifics are arriving on the scene to stake a claim for a market that could cross $10 billion per year.

The main rivalry in multiple myeloma is shaping up to be one between Regeneron and Bristol-Myers, which picked up a bispecific antibody to BCMA through its recently closed $74 billion takeover of Celgene. Both presented promising first-in-human data at the ASH 2019 meeting.