A suite of bio­phar­mas dis­closed cuts to their pipelines this week as the in­dus­try gets a sweep­ing up­date of drugs in the works as part of the an­nu­al JP Mor­gan Health­care Con­fer­ence.

Jasper Ther­a­peu­tics, Ac­ti­cor Biotech, NGM Bio and An­nex­on were among those to slash parts of their de­vel­op­ment plans.

The moves fol­low a rough 2022 for the mar­ket, in which dozens of biotechs shift­ed pri­or­i­ties to con­serve cash and stay afloat. Bio­phar­mas rou­tine­ly fine-tune their pipelines, but the con­sis­ten­cy of culls and lay­offs last year stood out.

For Jasper, the ad­just­ment to its clin­i­cal plans has sent the stock price $JSPR soar­ing near­ly 28% af­ter Tues­day’s open­ing bell, con­tin­u­ing a share price rise from last week fol­low­ing a Phase I/II da­ta read­out in sick­le cell dis­ease (SCD) and be­ta tha­lassemia. The biotech had for near­ly a year been talk­ing about a reg­is­tra­tional study of the drug, briquil­imab, in pa­tients with myelodys­plas­tic syn­dromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). But those piv­otal plans, still in ex­is­tence as of a No­vem­ber up­date, are now shelved, ac­cord­ing to a Tues­day up­date.

“We be­lieve fo­cus­ing on the most well-char­ac­ter­ized op­por­tu­ni­ties with the clear­est and po­ten­tial­ly fastest path­way to mar­ket is in the best in­ter­est of pa­tients and our share­hold­ers,” pres­i­dent and CEO Ronald Martell said in a press re­lease.

The re­fined pipeline will fo­cus on ex­ist­ing stud­ies in SCD, Fan­coni ane­mia and se­vere com­bined im­mun­od­e­fi­cien­cy and launch­ing a tri­al in chron­ic low­er-risk myelodys­plas­tic syn­drome. The biotech is al­so adding a new in­di­ca­tion: chron­ic ur­ticaria, or hives and itchy skin welts that last for weeks on end.

“Based on pre­clin­i­cal and clin­i­cal stud­ies show­ing in­hi­bi­tion of c-Kit sig­nal­ing, de­ple­tion of mast cells in skin and lung and ex­tend­ed phar­ma­co­ki­net­ics of sub­cu­ta­neous dos­ing, the Com­pa­ny has pri­or­i­tized rapid­ly start­ing a clin­i­cal study in se­vere chron­ic ur­ticaria,” the Red­wood City, CA biotech said.

Ear­li­er in the week, Paris-based Ac­ti­cor said it would post­pone a Phase II study of glen­zocimab in pul­monary em­bolism. The drug will con­tin­ue in two on­go­ing Phase II/III stud­ies for stroke and one Phase IIb for my­ocar­dial in­farc­tion. One of those stud­ies is meant to sup­port a fast track des­ig­na­tion with the FDA and will be the ba­sis of a po­ten­tial mar­ket­ing au­tho­riza­tion fil­ing in the EU.

NGM Bio, af­ter reel­ing from an axed eye drug pact with Mer­ck last month, said it will seek a new part­ner for the drug, known as NGM621. The South San Fran­cis­co biotech will al­so shop around its NASH and bile acid dys­reg­u­la­tion can­di­date aldafer­min and a bis­pe­cif­ic (NGM936) in­tend­ed for pa­tients with mul­ti­ple myelo­ma and acute myeloid leukemia.

Au­toim­mune, neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive and oph­thalmic dis­or­ders biotech An­nex­on said it would end work in warm au­toim­mune he­molyt­ic ane­mia, or wAI­HA, in which healthy red blood cells are de­stroyed ear­ly. The Cal­i­for­nia biotech said it made the move “fol­low­ing an as­sess­ment of the mar­ket op­por­tu­ni­ty in wAI­HA and a range of ad­di­tion­al au­toim­mune in­di­ca­tions.”

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”