Months af­ter the FDA sanc­tioned the ap­proval of Roche’s run­ner up check­point in­hibitor Tecen­triq in com­bi­na­tion with Cel­gene’s Abrax­ane for treat­ment naive pa­tients with triple neg­a­tive breast can­cer, Mer­ck’s keynote PD-1 Keytru­da has stum­bled in a late-stage tri­al as the sec­ond or third line of de­fense against the rare, ag­gres­sive form of can­cer.

Pa­tients in the 622-pa­tient tri­al were ei­ther giv­en the block­buster treat­ment or chemother­a­py. The main goal of the study — over­all sur­vival — was not met, Mer­ck said, adding that de­tails will be dis­closed at a lat­er date.

The US drug­mak­er will con­tin­ue to test Keytru­da monother­a­py and in com­bi­na­tion with chemother­a­py in ear­li­er stages of the dif­fi­cult-to-treat dis­ease.

About 10-20% of all breast can­cers are triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cers (TNBCs), which char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly has a high re­cur­rence rate with­in the first five years af­ter di­ag­no­sis. In TNBC pa­tients, the growth of the can­cer is not fu­eled by the hor­mones es­tro­gen and prog­es­terone, or by the HER2 pro­tein, mak­ing it hard to treat.

Roche’s Tecen­triq com­bi­na­tion with Abrax­ane was the first-ever im­munother­a­py to get ap­proval in the first­line TNBC set­ting. The ap­proval was key for the Swiss drug­mak­er that is third-in-line — be­hind Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb and Mer­ck — for the check­point in­hibitor Iron throne. The large drug­mak­er must get ahead of its ri­vals in cru­cial can­cer ar­eas if it wants to hold on to its po­si­tion, as As­traZeneca carves out a niche for its PD-L1 check­point Imfinzi in a sub­set of non-small cell lung can­cer pa­tients.

About 70% of breast can­cers di­ag­nosed in peo­ple with an in­her­it­ed BR­CA mu­ta­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly BR­CA1, are di­ag­nosed with TNBC. PARP in­hibitors such as As­traZeneca’s Lyn­parza and Pfiz­er’s Talzen­na are al­ready ap­proved for germline BR­CA-mu­tat­ed breast can­cer, and are be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed in com­bi­na­tion with check­point in­hibitors for TNBC.

Mean­while, an­ti­body drug con­ju­gates are an­oth­er po­ten­tial treat­ment op­tion for TNBC un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

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?

The biopharma R&D food chain is paying off with a plan at Sanofi to pitch regulators on a new drug for an orphan disease called cold agglutinin disease.

The pharma giant ushered out a statement Tuesday morning — after it spelled out plans to radically restructure the company, abandoning cardio and diabetes research altogether — saying that their C1s inhibitor sutimlimab had cleared the pivotal study.