Just a few days af­ter open­ing up its new US head­quar­ters on Boston har­bor in prep for what they be­lieve is the im­mi­nent ap­proval of a new CAR-T ri­val, Mor­phoSys says that its top sci­en­tist is step­ping down and they’re re­or­ga­niz­ing R&D un­der de­vel­op­ment chief Malte Pe­ters.

Markus En­zel­berg­er Mor­phoSys

We don’t know the de­tails about what’s up, aside from the fact that they said in an an­nounce­ment that 17-year com­pa­ny vet­er­an Markus En­zel­berg­er is leav­ing his job as chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer to ex­plore new op­por­tu­ni­ties. And with his de­par­ture, they will be “in­te­grat­ing” re­search in­to the de­vel­op­ment op­er­a­tion.

This is the lat­est in a pair of high-pro­file change­ups in the ex­ec­u­tive crew at Mor­phoSys this year. CEO Si­mon Mo­roney an­nounced he would step aside near the be­gin­ning of the year. He was re­placed by Jean-Paul Kress, the for­mer CEO at Boston-based Syn­tim­mune, which was bought out by Alex­ion.

The Ger­man biotech has been beef­ing up its US com­mer­cial team in prepa­ra­tion for the like­ly ap­proval of their CD19-tar­get­ing an­ti­body taf­a­sita­m­ab — or MOR208. Com­bined with lenalido­mide they be­lieve they can of­fer a more ap­peal­ing al­ter­na­tive to Kym­ri­ah and Yescar­ta — the first 2 CAR-Ts, af­ter a tri­al showed that pa­tients suf­fer­ing from treat­ment-re­sis­tant DL­B­CL, a com­mon form of non-Hodgkin’s lym­phoma, pro­duced a me­di­an on pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival rate 12.1 months with a me­di­an du­ra­tion of re­sponse at 21.7 months. The over­all re­sponse rate among 80 pa­tients was 60% with a 43% com­plete re­sponse rate.

They’ve been dis­cussing a mid-2020 mar­ket launch in the US.

Magenta Therapeutics is pausing an early-stage clinical trial after a patient died. The death was deemed to be possibly related to its drug, MGTA-117.

The biotech said the pause of the Phase I/II trial is voluntary and gives it time to review all available data before deciding what to do next. It’s also reported the known information to the FDA.

The dose-escalation trial was designed to test whether MGTA-117, an antibody-drug conjugate, could serve as a more targeted alternative to high-intensity chemotherapy as a conditioning agent for cancer patients who are set to receive a stem cell transplant. It recruited patients with relapsed/refractory acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome.

The FDA hasn’t detected any potential safety signals, including for stroke, in people aged 65 years and older who have received Pfizer’s bivalent Covid booster, one senior official told members of the agency’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Thursday.

The update comes as the FDA and CDC investigate a “preliminary signal” that may indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke in older Americans who received Pfizer’s updated shot.

Bristol Myers Squibb is looking to expand Breyanzi into more indications — and the pharma’s newest data readout makes progress on that front.

The Big Pharma put out word Thursday that the CAR-T cell therapy met the primary endpoint of complete response rate compared to historical control in a subset of patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that were refractory to a BTK inhibitor and pretreated with a BCL-2 inhibitor.

The FDA has stopped use of another drug as a result of the new coronavirus variants. On Thursday, the agency announced that AstraZeneca’s antibody combo Evusheld, which was an important prevention option for many immunocompromised people and others, is no longer authorized.

The FDA said it made its decision based on the fact that Evusheld works on fewer than 10% of circulating variants.

Evusheld was initially given emergency authorization at the end of 2021. However, as Omicron emerged, so did studies that showed Evusheld might not work against the dominant Omicron strain. In October, the FDA warned healthcare providers that Evusheld was useless against the Omicron subvariant BA.4.6. It followed that up with another announcement earlier this month that it did not think Evusheld would work against the latest Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5.

Aridis Pharmaceuticals’ monoclonal antibody missed the bar in a Phase III test in ventilator-associated pneumonia caused by the gram-positive bacteria S. aureus, the company announced Wednesday. 

But Aridis is planning for a second Phase III study anyway once it discusses the findings with the FDA and the European Medicines Agency. Execs blamed recruitment challenges stemming from Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the miss, cutting their enrollment target in half.

XyloCor Therapeutics says patients with heart disease who got its gene therapy could exercise for longer and had fewer chest pain attacks. The biotech announced it completed a Phase I/II trial of the gene therapy Thursday morning, and plans to move forward with a pivotal trial.

In the Phase II portion of the trial, 28 patients with angina (or chest pain) caused by coronary artery disease and who had no other treatment options were enrolled and were given the highest tested dose from the first part of the trial. Patients were followed for six months.