The French meta­bol­ic ex­perts at Pox­el have re­versed course on their planned so­lo de­vel­op­ment mis­sion in Japan, lin­ing up an Asian part­ner for their late-stage di­a­betes drug imeglim­in.

Sum­it­o­mo Dainip­pon Phar­ma stepped up with a $42 mil­lion up­front, with promis­es of $24 mil­lion more for de­vel­op­ment mile­stones and about $233 mil­lion for hit­ting a slate of sales goals. In ex­change they land mar­ket­ing and de­vel­op­ment rights — they’ll be pay­ing for the Phase III — in Chi­na, Japan and oth­er key Asian coun­tries.

Thomas Kuhn

Back in May, though, Pox­el CEO Thomas Kuhn told me the biotech was plan­ning to go at Phase III in Japan all by it­self, a rare feat in the di­a­betes world, where a few key gi­ants dom­i­nate the glob­al land­scape for a dis­ease that has claimed mil­lions of pa­tients.

In­vestors didn’t mind, though, send­ing Pox­el’s shares (EPA: $POX­EL) rock­et­ing up 43%.

The Mer­ck Serono spin­out had ini­tial­ly fig­ured that it could pull off a Phase III pro­gram in Japan with 1,000 pa­tients, far few­er than what would nor­mal­ly be ex­pect­ed. Pox­el is styling imeglim­in as a mi­to­chon­dr­i­al ther­a­py that could pro­tect be­ta cells, mak­ing it a good po­ten­tial add-on. Its shares rock­et­ed up 40% last May af­ter a Phase IIb tri­al in Japan reg­is­tered he­mo­glo­bin A1c re­duc­tions of 0.52%, 0.94% and 1.00% for the 500 mg, 1000 mg and 1500 mg dose twice-dai­ly.

“Giv­en imeglim­in’s unique pro­file and nov­el mech­a­nism of ac­tion, which we be­lieve is well-suit­ed for Asian pa­tients, it has the po­ten­tial to be a very im­por­tant new oral ther­a­py for the treat­ment of type 2 di­a­betes. With their very long and suc­cess­ful his­to­ry of com­mer­cial­iz­ing di­a­betes prod­ucts and as a leader in this re­gion with a ded­i­cat­ed fran­chise, Sum­it­o­mo Dainip­pon Phar­ma will be an ex­cel­lent part­ner for imeglim­in in Asia,” said Kuhn in a state­ment. “Our near-term fo­cus in Japan is to ini­ti­ate the Phase III pro­gram and to work close­ly with Sum­it­o­mo Dainip­pon Phar­ma to sup­port the Japan­ese New Drug Ap­pli­ca­tion sub­mis­sion.”

Another big drug approval came through on Friday afternoon as the FDA OK’d AbbVie’s upadacitinib — an oral JAK1 inhibitor that is hitting the rheumatoid arthritis market with a black box warning of serious malignancies, infections and thrombosis reflecting fears associated with the class.

It will be sold as Rinvoq — at a wholesale price of $59,000 a year — and will likely soon face competition from a drug that AbbVie once controlled, and spurned. Reuters reports that a 4-week supply of Humira, by comparison, is $5,174, adding up to about $67,000 a year.

After a “hot” period of rapid growth between 2009 and 2012, and a relatively “cooler” period of slower growth from 2013 to 2015, China has once again become a top-of-mind priority for the CEOs of most large, multinational pharmaceutical companies.

At the International Pharma Forum, hosted in March in Beijing by the R&D Based Pharmaceutical Association Committee (RDPAC) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), no fewer than seven CEOs of major multinational pharmaceutical firms participated, including GSK, Eli Lilly, LEO Pharma, Merck KGaA, Pfizer, Sanofi and UCB. A few days earlier, the CEOs of several other large multinationals attended the China Development Forum, an annual business forum hosted by the research arm of China’s State Council. It’s hard to imagine any other country, except the US, having such drawing power at CEO level.

ICER has some strong words for PTC, Sarepta and the FDA as the US drug price watchdog concludes that as currently priced, their respective new treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy are decidedly not cost-effective.

The final report — which cements the conclusions of a draft issued in May — incorporates the opinion of a panel of 17 experts ICER convened in a public meeting last month. It also based its analysis of Emflaza (deflazacort) and Exondys 51 (eteplirsen) on updated annual costs of $81,400 and over $1 million, respectively, after citing “incorrect” lower numbers in the initial calculations.