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.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

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.

Before remdesivir soaked up the spotlight amid the coronavirus crisis, Gilead’s filgotinib was the star experimental drug tapped to rake in billions competing with other JAK inhibitors made by rivals including AbbVie and Eli Lilly.

Now, long term data on the drug — discovered by Gilead’s partners at Galapagos and posted as part of a virtual medical conference — have solidified the durability and safety of filgotinib in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, spanning data from three late-stage trials. An FDA decision on the drug is expected this year.

Inovio was one of the first vaccine developers to snag attention for a jab that their execs said promised to end the Covid-19 pandemic. Using their own unique DNA tech, CEO Joseph Kim said it took just 3 hours to work it out.

But while rivals are racing to the finish line with ambitious plans to make vast quantities of their vaccines with billions of dollars of deals, Inovio is still stuck at the starting line on manufacturing.

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.