While many others have tried — and failed — to get a NASH candidate across the finish line, Terns Pharmaceuticals thinks its FXR agonist will eventually earn its wings without the safety issues that have slowed others down. Now, a mid-stage safety readout could help add some validity to those hopes.

No patients in the Phase IIa LIFT study discontinued TERN-101 due to side effects, CMO Erin Quirk said during a call with investors on Monday morning. That includes pruritus, an uncomfortable itching sensation that frequently leads patients to drop out of other FXR agonist studies.

Last week, AstraZeneca took a swing at J&J and AbbVie’s first-generation BTK inhibitor Imbruvica in the blood cancer chronic lymphocytic leukemia with long-term data from a head-to-head trial. But the partners aren’t going down without a fight.

AbbVie and Janssen unveiled pivotal data on Saturday showing that first-line CLL patients who received Imbruvica and AbbVie’s Roche-partnered Venclexta lived longer without disease progression than patients on Gazyva and the chemotherapy chlorambucil. The Phase III GLOW trial enrolled 211 elderly patients, or those with comorbidities or concurrent illnesses. Overall, the median age was 71 years old.

Less than 12 hours after revealing a flop on its second shot for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, Vertex plowed ahead with another data drop from its partnership with CRISPR Therapeutics. And though the topline proved positive, concerns over conditioning agents continue to linger over the collaboration, as well as the entire gene therapy space.

Presenting data from two trials at the European Hematology Association annual meeting, the pair announced that follow-up data of at least three months for 22 patients with genetic blood disorders indicated a “consistent and sustained” response to the experimental drug CTX001. All 15 patients with transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia did not need further blood transfusions and all seven with severe sickle cell disease were pain free, the biotechs announced.

A Massachusetts-based company that manufactures APIs closed its Series A and B fundraising, with J&J among the list of investors. Now, the company is announcing another $49 million loan to help boost operations.

Entrinsic Bioscience — or EBS — expects to use the loan to fund programs for GI, airway and skin diseases. CEO Stephen Gatto called these programs a “blueprint for serial innovation” in a press release.

Despite being third to the field in B cell lymphoma, Bristol Myers Squibb has repeatedly argued its CAR-T Breyanzi could have the juice to overtake its older competitors. Going into earlier lines of therapy may be the golden ticket on that front, and now Breyanzi has a late-stage win to back up that effort.

Bristol Myers’s Breyanzi beat out physicians’-choice salvage therapy followed by high-dose chemo and a stem cell transplant — what the drugmaker called a “gold standard treatment” — in second-line patients with relapsed or refractory large B cell lymphoma, according to topline data from the Phase III TRANSFORM study released Thursday.