The Department of Health and Human Services is taking the next step in its campaign to encourage Covid-19 vaccinations. The new fall “We Can Do This” ads move past the initial message to get a vaccine and asks Americans — especially people aged 50 and older — to get an “updated vaccine.”

Updated or bivalent boosters are the newer Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that add Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 components to the original vaccine — the CDC and HHS both recommended the shots earlier this month.

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Not 24 hours after earning the first ALS drug approval in five years, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals’ Relyvrio is already drawing scrutiny. And it’s coming from multiple fronts.

In an investor call Friday morning, Amylyx revealed that it would charge about $158,000 per year, a price point that immediately drew backlash from ALS advocates and some outside observers. The cost reveal had been highly anticipated in the immediate hours after Thursday evening’s approval, though Amylyx only teased Relyvrio would cost less than previously approved drugs.

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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.

After brief stops in Paris and Boston, John Carroll and the Endpoints crew are staying on the road in October with their return for a live/streaming EUBIO22 in London. The hybrid event fireside chats and panels on mRNA, oncology and the crazy public market. We hope you can join him there.

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For just the third time in its 116-year history, the FDA has approved a new treatment for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS.

US regulators gave the thumbs-up to the drug, known as Relyvrio, in a massive win for patients and their families. The approval, given to Boston-area biotech Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, comes after two years of long and contentious debates over the drug’s effectiveness between advocacy groups and FDA scientists, following the readout of a mid-stage clinical trial in September 2020.

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CHICAGO — While the later-stage drug developers in the geographic atrophy field are near the finish line, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen is taking a more deliberate route, with a treatment that it hopes to be a one-time fix.

The Big Pharma will take its Hemera Biosciences-acquired gene therapy into a Phase II study later this year in patients with GA, a common form of age-related macular degeneration that impacts about five million people worldwide. To get there, Janssen touted early-stage safety data at the American Academy of Ophthalmology annual conference Saturday morning, half a day after competitors Apellis and Iveric Bio revealed their own more-detailed Phase III analyses.

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While hereditary angioedema (HAE) is rare, treatment options for the condition have become much more common. So BioCryst Pharmaceuticals is taking a new angle in its recently launched HAE awareness campaign encouraging patients to take control of their disease management.

“Hereditary angioedema (HAE) isn’t the author of your story — you are … #cHAEngetheplan. Not the goal,” the US campaign website advises.

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CHICAGO — Eight weeks before patients and industry find out if the FDA approves the first treatment for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, the biotech behind the drug is out with some new data on a secondary endpoint.

In what study investigator Charles Wykoff called the “first direct evidence of function preservation by slowing GA growth” in an investigational treatment, Apellis Pharmaceuticals’ drug pegcetacoplan led to less loss of retinal sensitivity versus sham  within 250 microns on either side of the GA lesion over 24 months.

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