Lil­ly’s mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body, Taltz, which is al­ready ap­proved for pso­ri­at­ic arthri­tis and plaque pso­ri­a­sis has won its third ap­proval. The FDA has cleared its use in ac­tive anky­los­ing spondyli­tis (AS), a chron­ic in­flam­ma­to­ry rheumat­ic dis­or­der that af­fects the pelvic joints and spine, and can be char­ac­ter­ized by in­flam­ma­to­ry back pain, stiff­ness and im­paired func­tion and mo­bil­i­ty.

Taltz — akin to No­var­tis’ $NVS block­buster Cosen­tyx — in­hibits IL-17A, a cy­tokine in­volved in in­flam­ma­to­ry and im­mune re­spons­es. The drug, which will now al­so ad­dress the rough­ly 1.6 mil­lion Amer­i­cans with AS, gen­er­at­ed about $354 mil­lion in the sec­ond quar­ter.

Taltz was test­ed in two place­bo-con­trolled Phase III stud­ies that en­com­passed 657 AS pa­tients to eval­u­ate the pro­por­tion of pa­tients the drug had an im­pact on, in terms of symp­toms of pain, in­flam­ma­tion and func­tion at 16 weeks. In the COAST-V tri­al, which in­clud­ed pa­tients who had nev­er been treat­ed with an an­tirheumat­ic bi­o­log­ic, 48% of Taltz-treat­ed pa­tients achieved the re­sponse every four weeks ver­sus 18% of place­bo-treat­ed pa­tients (p<0.0001). In COAST-W tri­al, which in­volved pa­tients who did not ad­e­quate­ly ben­e­fit or were in­tol­er­ant to tu­mor necro­sis fac­tor (TNF) in­hibitors, 25% of pa­tients treat­ed with Taltz every four weeks achieved a re­sponse, ver­sus 13% of pa­tients giv­en the place­bo (p<0.05).

Four months ago, Lil­ly’s $LLY Taltz al­so cleared a late-stage study called COAST-X, in pa­tients with a form of in­flam­ma­to­ry arthri­tis in which there is no vis­i­ble ev­i­dence of dam­age on X-rays — non-ra­di­ograph­ic ax­i­al spondy­loarthri­tis (nr-AxS­pA).

Cosen­tyx is al­so ap­proved for AS, as is UCB’s TNF block­er Cimzia.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.