John­son & John­son has put two ear­ly-stage bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies on the back­burn­er, the phar­ma gi­ant re­vealed as part of its quar­ter­ly up­date.

List­ed in the pipeline as re­cent­ly as Oc­to­ber, JNJ-6358 — a bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­body bind­ing to CD3 on T cells and hu­man leuko­cyte anti­gen G (HLA-G) on can­cer cells — and JNJ-8902 — a CD3 x TM­EFF2 bis­pe­cif­ic — were nowhere to be found in the lat­est pipeline pre­sen­ta­tion.

A spokesper­son con­firmed that while their re­spec­tive tri­als are on­go­ing, these “are not pri­or­i­tized as­sets in our de­vel­op­ment port­fo­lio.” Fierce­Biotech first not­ed the pipeline cuts.

Both of the Phase I tri­als are ac­tive but not re­cruit­ing, the spokesper­son added.

Records on clin­i­cal­tri­als.gov sug­gest­ed both tri­als end­ed up en­rolling few­er pa­tients than ex­pect­ed.

The study for JNJ-6358 tar­get­ed pa­tients with re­nal cell car­ci­no­ma, ovar­i­an can­cer, col­orec­tal can­cer and oth­er ad­vanced sol­id tu­mors. A to­tal of 39 pa­tients were en­rolled be­fore re­cruit­ment stopped, com­pared to 140 orig­i­nal­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed.

In the oth­er tri­al, in­ves­ti­ga­tors en­rolled 82 men with metasta­t­ic cas­tra­tion-re­sis­tant prostate can­cer to re­ceive JNJ-8902 — but scrapped the orig­i­nal 120 goal.

Mul­ti­ple ear­ly-stage pro­grams tar­get­ing prostate can­cer re­main in J&J’s pipeline, as well as an ex­per­i­men­tal ther­a­py for col­orec­tal can­cer, among oth­ers.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.