Neu­rotrope this week joined the long line of bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies that have been mauled by clin­i­cal fail­ure for Alzheimer’s drugs. But their crushed shares ($NTRP down from more than $8 in June to pen­ny stock range to­day) rep­re­sent­ed just a tiny drop in the buck­et of red ink that has drained from play­ers which have pur­sued the great­est of all Holy Grails in drug R&D. Decades of de­feat, head­lined by the likes of solanezum­ab at Eli Lil­ly stretch­ing to the most re­cent sna­fu with Bio­gen’s ad­u­canum­ab, have forced a slew of play­ers to change course on their R&D strat­e­gy — or just leave it in lim­bo.

How bad is it?

Bio­gen’s shares tanked when ad­u­canum­ab bombed, forc­ing an ear­ly halt to the late-stage ef­fort. The mar­ket cap shriv­eled by bil­lions, and it’s still down about 29% from pre-cri­sis lev­els. That plunge came af­ter Roche’s crenezum­ab flopped, though Roche was much bet­ter po­si­tioned to han­dle the fail­ure. But its part­ner, AC Im­mune $ACIU saw its share price halved in the fall­out.

The field went over the cliff in 2019.

What makes this im­por­tant for the long run?

In­vestors and an­a­lysts don’t gen­er­al­ly care to en­ter a mine­field where the chance of be­ing blown sky-high has been run­ning 100% — a mes­sage that has been heard loud and clear in re­cent months. Bio­gen — still al­lied to Ei­sai — has es­sen­tial­ly been ad­vised to write off Alzheimer’s al­to­geth­er as a com­plete loss. The amy­loid hy­poth­e­sis lies in tat­ters, while a se­ries of BACE fail­ures al­so un­der­scored some trou­bling safe­ty is­sues that made it all the way in­to a se­ries of late-stage stud­ies.

No one here re­al­ly knows what they’re do­ing. And any new rounds of mid-stage da­ta claim­ing suc­cess against bio­mark­ers are wide­ly ig­nored. Be­cause the bio­mark­ers have nev­er been proven to be in­dica­tive of suc­cess.

And with­out in­vestor sup­port, you can for­get any ma­jor new for­ays in late-stage test­ing.

The fo­cus now has shift­ed to tau and com­bo ther­a­pies, as new com­pa­nies start to tout ques­tion­able ev­i­dence of “suc­cess” in or­der to try to lure in­vestors back. But af­ter you’ve been burned this many times, that ar­gu­ment will be hard to make.

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

Amgen has signed up to be AbbVie’s neighbor in South San Francisco as it moves into a nine-story R&D facility in the booming biotech hub.

The arrangement gives Amgen 240,000 square feet of space on the Gateway of Pacific Campus, just a few minutes drive from its current digs at Oyster Point. The new hub will open in 2022 and house the big biotech’s Bay Area employees working on cardiometabolic, inflammation and oncology research.

Scripps and AbbVie go way back. Research conducted in the lab of Scripps scientist Richard Lerner led to the discovery of Humira. The antibody, approved by the FDA in 2002 and sold by AbbVie, went on to become the world’s bestselling treatment. In 2018, the drugmaker and the non-profit organization signed a pact focused on developing cancer treatments — and now, the scope of that partnership has broadened to encompass a range of diseases, including immunological and neurological conditions.

Three Samsung executives in Korea are going to jail.

The convictions came in what prosecutors had billed as “biggest crime of evidence destruction in the history of South Korea”: a case of alleged corporate intrigue that was thrown open when investigators found what was hidden beneath the floor of a Samsung BioLogics plant. Eight employees in total were found guilty of evidence tampering and the three executives were each sentenced to up to two years in prison.

Cellarity started with a simple — but far from easy — idea that Avak Kahvejian and his team were floating around at Flagship Pioneering: to digitally encode a cell.

As he and his senior associate Nick Plugis dug deeper into the concept, they found that most of the models others have developed take a bottom-up approach, where they assemble the molecules inside cells and the connections between them from scratch. What if they opt for a top-down approach, aided by single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning, to gauge the behavior of the entire cellular network?