Incyte takes a beating as a key PhIII study flops in their latest painful setback — blockbuster hopes crushed

Hervé Hoppenot. Jeff Rumans for Endpoints News

January 2, 2020 04:57 PM ESTUpdated January 3, 06:35 AM

Incyte takes a beating as a key PhIII study flops in their latest painful setback — blockbuster hopes crushed

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Another late-stage catalyst at Incyte is going down in flames.

Widely viewed as a key moment for Incyte, which has been working to make a comeback after the IDO disaster with epacadostat, the biotech reported Thursday evening that its Phase III study for itacitinib in first-line graft vs host disease has flopped.

Shares $INCY tanked 10% on the news after the bell, nicking off close to $2 billion in market cap.

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February 26, 2021 07:00 AM EST

Deals

Roivant parlays a $450M chunk of equity in biotech buyout, grabbing a computational group to drive discovery work

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

New Roivant CEO Matt Gline has crafted an all-equity upfront deal to buy out a Boston-based biotech that has been toiling for several years now at building a supercomputing-based computational platform to design new drugs. And he’s adding it to the Erector set of science operations that are being built up to support their network of biotech subsidiaries with an eye to growing the pipeline in a play to create a new kind of pharma company.

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Targeting a Potential Vulnerability of Certain Cancers with DNA Damage Response

Andree Blaukat

Every individual’s DNA is unique, and because of this, every patient responds differently to disease and treatment. It is astonishing how four tiny building blocks of our DNA – A, T, C, G – dictate our health, disease, and how we age.

The tricky thing about DNA is that it is constantly exposed to damage by sources such as ultraviolet light, certain chemicals, toxins, and even natural biochemical processes inside our cells.¹ If ignored, DNA damage will accumulate in replicating cells, giving rise to mutations that can lead to premature aging, cancer, and other diseases.

February 25, 2021 08:31 AM ESTUpdated 09:46 AM

Editor's note

Follow biotechs going public with the Endpoints News IPO Tracker

Max Gelman

Associate Editor

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

Ken Frazier, Merck CEO (Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

February 25, 2021 07:43 AM ESTUpdated 10:46 AM

Deals

Pharma

UPDATED: Merck takes a swing at the IL-2 puzzlebox with a $1.85B play for buzzy Pandion and its autoimmune hopefuls

Kyle Blankenship

Managing Editor

When Roger Perlmutter bid farewell to Merck late last year, the drugmaker perhaps best known now for sales giant Keytruda signaled its intent to take a swing at early-stage novelty with the appointment of discovery head Dean Li. Now, Merck is signing a decent-sized check to bring an IL-2 moonshot into the fold.

Merck will shell out roughly $1.85 billion for Pandion Pharmaceuticals, a biotech hoping to gin up regulatory T cells (Tregs) to treat a range of autoimmune disorders, the drugmaker said Thursday.

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February 26, 2021 07:14 AM ESTUpdated 07:34 AM

Coronavirus

Covid-19 roundup: Merck's $356M supply deal on hold as FDA asks for more data; FDA approves Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine storage at standard freezer temps

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Nicole DeFeudis

Associate Editor

Merck is pushing back plans to supply the US government with a Covid-19 drug after the FDA asked for more data to support an emergency use authorization.

The antibody, MK-7110, had looked promising in a Phase III study conducted by OncoImmune before Merck came along and bought the biotech for $425 million. At the interim analysis, investigators looked at data from 203 patients and concluded that a single dose of the drug cut the risk of death or respiratory failure by more than 50% among severe patients. And those taking the drug had a 60% higher chance of improvement in clinical status compared to placebo.

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CEO Fred Aslan (Artiva)

February 26, 2021 07:00 AM EST

Financing

Cell/Gene Tx

NK cell therapy player Artiva makes some more noise, pulling in $120M Series B less than a month after Merck deal

Max Gelman

Associate Editor

Not even one month after Big Pharma took notice of Artiva when Merck signed a collaboration worth nearly $2 billion in milestones, the off-the-shelf NK cell biotech already has its next big fundraise.

Artiva returns from the venture well Friday with a $120 million Series B round, money they will use to get their first program into the clinic and to file INDs for another two candidates. The raise marks the latest development in a rapidly expanding footprint for Artiva, which, in addition to the Merck deal last month, has now raised almost $200 million since its Series A last June.

Fatty liver conceptual image, 3D illustration showing fatty liver silhouette made from micrograph of liver steatosis (Shutterstock)

February 26, 2021 07:00 AM EST

Biotech Voices

The path to NASH: understanding the role of severe obesity in a complex, multi-system disease

Kitty Yale

Chief Development Officer, Akero

Biotech Voices is a collection of exclusive opinion editorials from some of the leading voices in biopharma on the biggest industry questions today. Think you have a voice that should be heard? Reach out to senior editors Kyle Blankenship and Amber Tong.

We often think a person’s transition from a healthy to a diseased state is binary. But that’s often not the case. In reality, the onset of a disease is not something that occurs overnight, and the majority lie on a continuum that is impacted by a multitude of factors. Some of these factors are in a patient’s control. Others are not.

This is the case in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), two of the most complex diseases that “live” on this proverbial continuum. The clinical onset of NAFLD — and ultimately NASH — is a complex process that is closely related to obesity, insulin resistance and impaired adipose tissue metabolism.

Doug Ingram (file photo)

February 26, 2021 04:48 AM EST

Pharma

Regulatory

Why not? Sarepta’s third Duchenne MD drug sails to accelerated approval

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Sarepta may be running into some trouble with its next-gen gene therapy approach to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. But when it comes to antisense oligonucleotides, the well-trodden regulatory path is still leading straight to an accelerated approval for casimersen, now christened Amondys 45.

We just have to wait until 2024 to find out if it works.

Amondys 45’s approval was unceremonious, compared to its two older siblings. There was no controversy within the FDA over approving a drug based on a biomarker rather than clinical benefit, setting up a powerful precedent that still haunts acting FDA commissioner Janet Woodcock as biotech insiders weighed her potential permanent appointment; no drama like the FDA issuing a stunning rejection only to reverse its decision and hand out an OK four months later, which got more complicated after the scathing complete response letter was published; no anxious tea leaf reading or heated arguments from drug developers and patient advocates who were tired of having corticosteroids as their loved ones’ only (sometimes expensive) option.

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Steve Cutler, Icon CEO (Icon)

February 24, 2021 10:50 AM ESTUpdated 11:53 AM

Deals

In the biggest CRO takeover in years, Icon doles out $12B for PRA Health Sciences to focus on decentralized clinical work

Max Gelman

Associate Editor

Contract research M&A had a healthy run in recent years before recently petering out. But with the market ripe for a big buyout and the Covid-19 pandemic emphasizing the importance of decentralized trials, Wednesday saw a tectonic shift in the CRO world.

Icon, the Dublin-based CRO, will acquire PRA Health Sciences for $12 billion in a move that will shake up the highest rungs of a fragmented market. The merger would combine the 5th- and 6th-largest CROs by 2020 revenue, according to Icon, and the merger will set the newco up to be the second-largest global CRO behind only IQVIA.

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