Chris­t­ian Hogg Chi-Med

→ One of Chi-Med’s late-stage fa­vorites is grad­u­at­ing ear­ly from its Phase III study, hav­ing met its pri­ma­ry end­points at in­ter­im analy­sis. The Hong Kong-head­quar­tered biotech left out the num­bers in its brief state­ment, which not­ed that su­r­u­fa­tinib hit a PFS goal among pa­tients with ex­tra-pan­cre­at­ic neu­roen­docrine tu­mors. CEO Chris­t­ian Hogg has tapped the drug, along­side savoli­tinib, for ap­provals over the next two years to fol­low up on the land­mark OK for fruquin­tinib in Chi­na.

→ Am­gen $AMGN and Al­ler­gan $AGN have nabbed an OK to mar­ket their Her­ceptin copy­cat — chris­tened Kan­jin­ti — in the US for all ap­proved in­di­ca­tions of the Roche block­busters in­clud­ing HER2-over­ex­press­ing breast can­cer and gas­tric or gas­troe­sophageal junc­tion ade­no­car­ci­no­ma. “Kan­jin­ti is the sec­ond of four biosim­i­lars from Am­gen and Al­ler­gan’s col­lab­o­ra­tion to be ap­proved by the FDA,” David Nichol­son, Al­ler­gan’s chief re­search and de­vel­op­ment of­fi­cer, not­ed.

David Nichol­son Al­ler­gan

→ Last year, Sun Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals en­tered the crowd­ed mar­ket for plaque pso­ri­a­sis with its IL-23 in­hibitor Ilumya. On Fri­day, the In­di­an drug­mak­er said the mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body — in-li­censed from Mer­ck $MRK back in 2014 for $80 mil­lion — cleared a mid-stage study in pa­tients with pso­ri­at­ic arthri­tis. The in­ter­im analy­sis re­vealed that over 71% of pa­tients treat­ed with the drug ex­pe­ri­enced a 20% im­prove­ment in joint and skin symp­toms, meet­ing the pri­ma­ry end­point of the study.

As a potentially powerful flu season looms, so does a big test for Roche and its new flu drug, Xofluza. The Swiss giant just got a small boost in advance of that test as the FDA expanded Xofluza’s indication to include patients at high risk of developing flu-related complications.

Xofluza (baloxavir marboxil) was approved last October in the US, the first landmark flu drug approval in 20 years and a much-needed green light for a company that had watched its leading flu drug Tamiflu get eaten alive by generics. Like its predecessor, the pill offered a reduction in flu symptoms but not a cure.

The first-ever Ebola vaccine is on the precipice of approval after the European Medicine’s Agency (EMA) backed the Merck product in this week’s roster of recommendations.

The drugmaker $MRK began developing the vaccine, christened Ervebo, during the West African outbreak that occurred between 2014 and 2016, killing more than 11,000.

The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has shown case fatality rates of approximately 67%, the agency estimated. Earlier this year, the WHO declared the outbreak — which so far has infected more than 3,000 people — a public health emergency of international concern.

Medical animation has in recent years become an increasingly important tool for conveying niche information to a varied audience, particularly to those audiences without expertise in the specialist area. Science programmes today, for example, have moved from the piece-to-camera of the university professor explaining how a complex disease mechanism works, to actually showing the viewer first-hand what it might look like to shrink ourselves down to the size of an ant’s foot, and travel inside the human body to witness these processes in action. Effectively communicating a complex disease pathophysiology, or the novel mechanism of action of a new drug, can be complex. This is especially difficult when the audience domain knowledge is limited or non-existent. Medical animation can help with this communication challenge in several ways.
Improved accessibility to visualisation
Visualisation is a core component of our ability to understand a concept. Ask 10 people to visualise an apple, and each will come up with a slightly different image, some apples smaller than others, some more round, some with bites taken. Acceptable, you say, we can move on to the next part of the story. Now ask 10 people to visualise how HIV’s capsid protein gets arranged into the hexamers and pentamers that form the viral capsid that holds HIV’s genetic material. This request may pose a challenge even to someone with some virology knowledge, and it is that inability to effectively visualise what is going on that holds us back from fully understanding the rest of the story. So how does medical animation help us to overcome this visualisation challenge?

ICER, an increasingly influential cost-effectiveness watchdog in the United States, has concluded in its review of treatments for cardiovascular disease that while the cost of J&J’s Xarelto and Amarin’s Vascepa meet its benchmark for value pricing — the two treatments will not likely treat as many patients as hoped without surpassing the annual budget threshold calculated by ICER for each therapy.