Ahead of Thursday’s meeting of the FDA’s Cardiovascular and Renal Drugs Advisory Committee, the agency is raising fresh doubts on whether FibroGen’s anemia drug roxadustat will cross the finish line.

New safety questions for roxadustat, a first-in-class inhibitor of HIF-PH enzymes, are emerging in the FDA’s briefing documents as the drug has been criticized for manipulating cardiovascular safety data after it had to double back and inform the FDA of some post-hoc statistical changes that some Wall Street analysts like Michael Yee at Jefferies said were material.

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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.

I hope your weekend is off to a nice start, wherever you are reading this email. As for me, I’m trying to catch the tail of the Lunar New Year festivities.

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While mRNA took center stage at yesterday’s FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting, Novavax announced its plans to deliver an updated protein-based vaccine based on new guidance.

Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) members voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all future vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

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The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use on Friday rejected Ipsen Pharma’s potential treatment for a rare genetic disease known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), which causes extra bone to form outside the skeleton.

The EMA said on its website that it could not draw any firm conclusions on the benefits of the French biopharma’s Sohonos (palovarotene), which selectively targets the retinoic-acid receptor gamma (RARγ), “as the applicant’s conclusion was based on a post-hoc analysis which was neither scientifically nor clinically justified and pre-specified study objectives were not met.”

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Sana Biotechnology is finally headed to the clinic.

Thursday afternoon, the biotech announced the FDA had cleared its application to start a clinical trial for its allogeneic, or “off-the-shelf,” CAR-T cell therapy targeting the antigen CD19 for patients with B-cell lymphomas and leukemias. Sana said its therapy, dubbed SC291, was designed to evade the immune system, which could help cell therapy produce a more durable response in patients, a concern that has followed such off-the-shelf therapies that use donor cells as opposed to a patient’s own cells.

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With the clock ticking on F-star Therapeutics’ takeover by a Chinese buyer, the companies are still scrambling to remove a hold on the deal from the US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

F-star and invoX Pharma said they are “actively negotiating” with CFIUS “about the terms of a mitigation agreement to address CFIUS’s concerns regarding potential national security risks posed by the transaction.”

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