The multifaceted campaign to create a CAR-T for solid tumors has run into a lethal problem.

In exclusive interviews, Tmunity founders Carl June and Oz Azam tell me that they have had to scrap their lead program for prostate cancer following the deaths of 2 patients earlier in the year — the last a little more than a month ago — after they experienced lethal bouts of neurotoxicity. What started as a voluntary halt by Tmunity in the face of these deaths flipped to an FDA-enforced red light for the clinical trial, while the biotech scrambled to rework its CAR-T design with a plan to get “version two” back into the clinic as soon as possible, with a new IND planned for the second half of the year.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

Reading about John Carroll’s pick of biotech’s most promising startups has become a treasured tradition. If you ever get curious about previous classes of the Endpoints 11, you can find all of them (plus a number of our other regular specials) here.

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Just one day after blockbuster Lynparza got access to another indication in China, its Big Pharma owners have decided to withdraw it in certain patients after reviewing Phase III data.

The two companies that work together on Lynparza decided to recall one of the indications several weeks ago in a specific type of ovarian cancer, Lynparza’s first indication when it was first FDA-approved in 2014. Initial data showed that rates of overall survival in patients with at least three rounds of chemo before getting on the PARP inhibitor were lower than in patients with less previous chemo treatment.

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When Ionis and AstraZeneca unveiled the first round of mid-stage data for their antisense PCSK9 drug, Mene Pangalos, AstraZeneca’s EVP of biopharmaceuticals R&D, underscored the drug’s “potential best-in-class efficacy profile.”

But now that the second batch is in, it appears AZD8233 isn’t hitting the mark after all.

Ionis announced Friday morning that although the candidate, also dubbed ION449, met the primary endpoint in the Phase IIb SOLANO trial, its partners at AstraZeneca have decided not to move it into Phase III studies because the “results did not achieve pre-specified efficacy criteria.”

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With a highly watched FDA decision deadline coming in late January, Biogen and Ionis dropped the full data on the Phase III study of their ALS drug tofersen in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

Biogen is looking for approval for tofersen in a very small subset of ALS patients — some 2%, according to the paper — who have a SOD1 gene mutation, which has previously been linked to ALS. Tofersen is meant to reduce levels of mutant SOD1 proteins.

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