HIV pa­tients will have to wait a while longer for a long-act­ing vi­ral sup­pres­sion reg­i­men as the FDA has re­ject­ed Vi­iV Health­care’s NDA for the month­ly in­jec­tion of cabote­gravir and rilpivirine.

Reg­u­la­tors hand­ed the GSK sub­sidiary a com­plete re­sponse let­ter days be­fore the orig­i­nal PDU­FA date on De­cem­ber 29. While Vi­iV had been ex­pect­ing a smooth sail to the fin­ish line based on glow­ing clin­i­cal re­sults, the CRL cit­ed con­cerns with chem­istry man­u­fac­tur­ing and con­trols.

“There have been no re­port­ed safe­ty is­sues re­lat­ed to CMC and there is no change to the safe­ty pro­file of the prod­ucts used in clin­i­cal tri­als to date,” Vi­iV added in a short state­ment.

Kim Smith

A de­lay here with the month­ly in­jec­tion of cabote­gravir and rilpivirine al­so means that Vi­iV will have to push back on the planned sN­DA fil­ing for the 2-month­ly reg­i­men, which was slat­ed for the first quar­ter of 2020.

Gilead’s block­buster cock­tails, both dou­blets and triplets, have been im­mense­ly suc­cess­ful at keep­ing HIV to un­de­tectable lev­els, but they have still left pa­tients sad­dled with the bur­den of tak­ing dai­ly pills — which Vi­iV said is not on­ly in­con­ve­nient but al­so car­ries an emo­tion­al bur­den. With their new for­mu­la­tion of their own ex­per­i­men­tal cabote­gravir (in­te­grase in­hibitor) and J&J’s rilpivirine (non-nu­cle­o­side re­verse tran­scrip­tase in­hibitor), Vi­iV was look­ing to shake up the treat­ment land­scape and carve out a big­ger share from the Gilead-dom­i­nat­ed mar­ket.

The long-act­ing reg­i­men is de­signed for pa­tients who are al­ready vi­ro­log­i­cal­ly sup­pressed, have nev­er ex­pe­ri­enced vi­ro­log­i­cal fail­ures, and have not de­vel­oped re­sis­tance to ei­ther of the in­gre­di­ents. Vi­iV head of R&D Kim Smith has es­ti­mat­ed that around 10% to 15% of all pa­tients in the clin­ic would be can­di­dates.

Two late-stage stud­ies in­volv­ing 1180 pa­tients sug­gest­ed that their in­jec­tion was just as ef­fec­tive as stan­dard an­ti­retro­vi­ral ther­a­py in vi­ro­log­ic sup­pres­sion, with sim­i­lar rates of re­sis­tance at 1%. And as they fol­low up on a Phase IIb tri­al, re­searchers found that 83% of pa­tients re­main vi­ral­ly sup­pressed at the three-year mark.

That, along­side sim­i­lar­ly pos­i­tive da­ta for the 2-month­ly reg­i­men, would have made a ground­break­ing treat­ment op­tion. The com­pa­ny said it’s work­ing close­ly with the FDA to fig­ure out the next steps.

The biotech IPO parade continues marching forward as 2020 turns toward the fourth quarter.

IN8bio, a New York-based company focused on genetically modified gamma delta T cell therapies, filed to go public Friday seeking an $86 million raise. The company has two clinical-stage candidates being studied in glioblastoma and leukemia, respectively.

By any stretch of the imagination, 2020 has already been a huge year for biotech, and nowhere does it appear more obvious than the vast amounts of companies hitting the public market.

AbbVie and Roche’s Venclexta has gotten a new FDA thumbs up.

The pair announced Monday that regulators have approved the drug in combination with azacitidine or low-dose cytarabine for newly-diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia in adults who are 75 or older or those who can’t undergo intensive chemotherapy. This follows the drug’s accelerated approval in 2018 and positive data from two Phase III confirmatory trials.

Less than a week after Roche joined forces with Dyno Therapeutics to develop gene therapies using artificial intelligence, its giant subsidiary Genentech is hopping on the AI bandwagon with a different player.

Genentech has inked a deal with Stanford spinout Genesis Therapeutics to harness its AI power for drug development and discovery. Genesis is getting an upfront payment and milestones, but the companies are keeping the details under wraps for now. The Burlingame, CA-based biotech also stands to earn future royalties on any approved Genentech drugs that come from the deal.

From an ill-fated proposal to ban rebates for pharmacy benefit managers to an executive order demanding a “most-favored-nation price” for Medicare, if nothing else President Donald Trump has introduced Americans to a flurry of ideas to rein in pharma, an industry he once accused of “getting away with murder.” And now we’re getting the first glimpse of what a Joe Biden presidency might mean for prescription drug pricing.

A little less than two years after Endo Pharmaceuticals’ deal to purchase Somerset Therapeutics fell through, the Irish drugmaker is returning to the well with a much bigger acquisition.

Endo has agreed to buy BioSpecifics Technologies for a whopping $658 million, the two companies announced Monday, in the culmination of a research agreement signed all the way back in 2004. Endo will purchase all of BioSpecifics’ outstanding stock for about $540 million, valuing the company at $88.50 per share — a 45% premium on the $61.02 share price at which the company closed on Friday.