The FDA’s an­timi­cro­bial drugs ad­vi­so­ry com­mit­tee on Thurs­day vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly in fa­vor of FDA ap­prov­ing Take­da’s an­tivi­ral for post-trans­plant cy­tomegalovirus.

The ad­comm vot­ed 17-0 on the ques­tion of whether the over­all ben­e­fit-risk pro­file is fa­vor­able for the use of Take­da’s marib­avir for the treat­ment of trans­plant re­cip­i­ents with CMV in­fec­tion and dis­ease re­frac­to­ry to treat­ment and with geno­typ­ic re­sis­tance to four oth­er an­tivi­rals — gan­ci­clovir, val­gan­ci­clovir, fos­car­net or cid­o­fovir.

On whether the drug, which took about two decades to de­vel­op, should be ap­proved for the same pop­u­la­tion but those with­out geno­typ­ic re­sis­tance to the four an­tivi­rals, the com­mit­tee vot­ed 17-0.

FDA’s brief­ing doc­u­ments re­leased ahead of the meet­ing showed how marib­avir proved safe across mul­ti­ple stud­ies and sta­tis­ti­cal­ly su­pe­ri­or to in­ves­ti­ga­tor-as­signed treat­ment (IAT) in a Phase III tri­al, which Take­da an­nounced ear­li­er this year.

While sev­er­al mem­bers of the ad­comm said dur­ing the dis­cus­sion that they don’t want to let per­fect be the en­e­my of the good in terms of the da­ta around marib­avir, sev­er­al oth­ers ques­tioned the end­point used in that tri­al, and why the tri­al didn’t in­clude a more di­verse pop­u­la­tion.

Ad­comm chair Lind­sey Baden of the Dana-Far­ber Can­cer In­sti­tute, who vot­ed in fa­vor of the ap­proval, al­so called the da­ta “messy,” but said the to­tal­i­ty of da­ta is per­sua­sive. He al­so not­ed the ad­van­tages of an oral drug in this in­di­ca­tion.

Com­mit­tee mem­ber Nan­cy Bridges, chief of the trans­plan­ta­tion branch at the NIH’s Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Al­ler­gy and In­fec­tious Dis­eases, who vot­ed in fa­vor of ap­proval al­so said that over­all, “the da­ta are very per­sua­sive.”

But she not­ed that the par­tic­i­pants in the Phase III tri­al “were over­whelm­ing­ly white,” even though this con­di­tion has a high­er preva­lence among African Amer­i­cans. “I’d like to see some da­ta from the com­pa­ny on ef­fi­ca­cy in African Amer­i­cans, which we don’t have,” Bridges said.

George Siber­ry, a med­ical of­fi­cer at the US Agency for In­ter­na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment, al­so said it was dis­ap­point­ing that no ado­les­cents were in­clud­ed in the piv­otal tri­al.

Pe­ter Weina, di­rec­tor of the De­fense Health Agency, said that even if the drug is ap­proved for a nar­row pop­u­la­tion, it’ll be used for all dif­fer­ent in­di­ca­tions off-la­bel.

“I’m torn that the dif­fer­ence be­tween geno­typ­ic re­sis­tance and no geno­typ­ic re­sis­tance is tru­ly a moot point here,” Weina said.

An ap­proval from FDA would cap a long and rocky his­to­ry for the drug, which has changed hands sev­er­al times over the last two decades fol­low­ing both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive tri­als.

Glax­o­SmithK­line first syn­the­sized the drug about 20 years ago and did some ear­ly clin­i­cal work be­fore li­cens­ing it to the rare dis­ease and in­fec­tious dis­ease-fo­cused biotech Vi­roPhar­ma.

Vi­roPhar­ma then missed a pri­ma­ry end­point in a Phase III study in 2009. Marib­avir failed to pre­vent CMV in­fec­tions bet­ter than place­bo in pa­tients re­ceiv­ing bone mar­row trans­plants. Vi­roPhar­ma sug­gest­ed a high­er dose might lead to a bet­ter re­sponse, but end­ed up pass­ing the can­di­date to Shire as part of a $4.2 bil­lion buy­out in 2013.

Shire upped the dose in var­i­ous phar­ma­co­ki­net­ic and ef­fi­ca­cy stud­ies, and in 2016, a Phase II study showed that the drug helped clear in­fec­tions. The FDA com­mend­ed the re­sults with a break­through des­ig­na­tion in 2018. And the fol­low­ing year, Take­da com­plet­ed its ac­qui­si­tion of Shire for $62 bil­lion.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.