News brief­ing: Atom­wise part­ners with Is­raeli in­cu­ba­tor; Bay­er col­lab­o­rates with Ve­r­a­cyte in thy­roid can­cer

AI play­er Atom­wise has teamed up with the Is­raeli-based in­cu­ba­tor Fu­tuRx to launch a com­pa­ny that will use its plat­form tech to tar­get a new drug for im­muno-on­col­o­gy.

A2i Ther­a­peu­tics will tap the Is­raeli In­no­va­tion Au­thor­i­ty, the Fu­tuRx in­vestors, and in-kind re­sources and sup­port pro­vid­ed by Atom­wise for the help it needs set­ting out.

“Fu­tuRx is ex­cit­ed to launch a new bio con­ver­gence com­pa­ny joint­ly with a world leader in AI-based drug dis­cov­ery,” said Kin­neret Sav­itzky, the CEO of Fu­tuRx. — John Car­roll

Bay­er teams with Ve­r­a­cyte for thy­roid can­cer test­ing

Bay­er has a new part­ner for thy­roid can­cer.

The big phar­ma is team­ing up with Ve­r­a­cyte to ad­vance re­search in­to the area, plan­ning to com­bine Bay­er’s plat­form with Ve­r­a­cyte’s test­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties to iden­ti­fy un­der­ly­ing ge­nom­ic dri­vers, in­clud­ing NTRK gene fu­sions, with­in pa­tients’ tu­mors. They ex­pect the pro­gram will fo­cus on pa­tients with ad­vanced or metasta­t­ic thy­roid can­cer that is ra­dioac­tive io­dine re­frac­to­ry.

Ve­r­a­cyte’s test­ing, called the Afir­ma XA, us­es RNA whole-tran­scrip­tome se­quenc­ing to dis­tin­guish DNA vari­ants and RNA fu­sions with­in about 600 genes. That in­cludes the NTRK gene fu­sion group.

Bay­er plans to of­fer test­ing at no cost to all el­i­gi­ble pa­tients when or­dered by their physi­cian, re­gard­less of the fi­nal re­sults and treat­ment de­ci­sion. The com­pa­nies an­tic­i­pate the pro­gram to launch in the first quar­ter of next year.

Bay­er es­ti­mates that about 2.5% to 12% of ra­dioac­tive io­dine re­frac­to­ry thy­roid can­cer tu­mors con­tain NTRK gene fu­sions. — Max Gel­man

A day af­ter GSK tie-up, So­sei lands a pro­tein degra­da­tion pact

So­sei Hep­tares is clos­ing out its year with a bang.

A day af­ter sign­ing a $44 mil­lion up­front, $437 mil­lion-in-mile­stones deal with Glax­o­SmithK­line, the Japan­ese dis­cov­ery spe­cial­ists an­nounced a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cap­tor Ther­a­peu­tics to dis­cov­er small mol­e­cules tar­get­ing G pro­tein-cou­pled re­cep­tors, the ubiq­ui­tous cell mem­brane pro­teins that So­sei has come to spe­cial­ize in.

So­sei will help Cap­tor with its pro­tein degra­da­tion pipeline, try­ing to come up with small mol­e­cules that can tag hard-to-hit pro­teins for de­struc­tion through the body’s nat­ur­al dis­pos­al sys­tem. It’s a field that has heat­ed up over the last two years, gen­er­at­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in Big Phar­ma and VC dol­lars. — Ja­son Mast

Achiev­ing Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion: Un­lock­ing Cost Re­duc­tion, Clin­i­cal Ex­cel­lence & Pre­ci­sion Ther­a­peu­tics Man­u­fac­tur­ing

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End­points 20(+2) un­der 40, 2023; Bio­phar­ma's high­est-paid CEOs; N-of-1 CRISPR sto­ry goes on af­ter tragedy; and more

Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

We will be off Monday in observance of Memorial Day — and when we get back, it will be a straight march to ASCO, BIO and more. Enjoy the (long) weekend!

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Rich Horgan (R) with his late brother, Terry

Rich Hor­gan spear­head­ed a gene ther­a­py for his broth­er. The tri­al end­ed in tragedy, but the work con­tin­ues for more pa­tients

Rich Horgan’s quest to create a custom gene therapy for his brother, Terry, ended in tragedy. But Horgan doesn’t believe it’s the end of the story.

Terry, a 27-year-old patient with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died last October just eight days after receiving the therapy in a clinical trial in which he was the only participant. The case raised questions about the safety of certain gene therapies and what would happen to other drug programs under a nonprofit that Horgan created, called Cure Rare Disease.

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Bio­phar­ma's 20 high­est-paid CEOs of 2022, each bring­ing in $20M+ pay­days

Even in a down year for much of the biopharma market, 20 CEOs brought in pay packages valued at more than $20 million, an Endpoints News analysis found.

Endpoints collected data on more than 350 CEO compensation packages, covering a wide range of pharma, biotech, and life sciences companies. All told, the 20 largest earners made over $725 million in 2022 — an average package of $36.4 million. Three brought in paydays over $50 million, and one CEO broke the $100 million mark.

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Douglas Love, Annexon CEO

An­nex­on’s GA drug miss­es on pri­ma­ry goal but win on vi­su­al acu­ity will be fo­cus of planned late-stage tri­al

Annexon’s complement inhibitor didn’t prove better than sham at reducing lesion growth in a leading cause of blindness, but the biotech still plans to move forward on the back of secondary endpoints showing visual acuity preservation, which will “certainly” be the primary goal in a late-stage trial to be discussed shortly with the FDA, CEO Douglas Love told Endpoints News. 

The California biotech’s ANX007 was not statistically significant compared to pooled sham, the comparator, at 12 months in patients with geographic atrophy, per a Wednesday presentation. In every-month dosing, the GA lesion area changed about 6.2% from baseline (p=0.526) and 1.3% (p=0.896) in the every-other-month group. In a March note, Jefferies analyst Suji Jeong said a reduction of 20% to 30% would be “encouraging.”

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The 20(+2) un­der 40: Your guide to the next gen­er­a­tion of biotech lead­ers

This year’s list of 20 biotech leaders under the age of 40 includes a huge range of ambitions. Some of our honorees are planning to create the next big drug giant. Others are pushing the bounds of AI. One is working to revolutionize TB testing. All are compelling talents who are still young in age, but already far along in achievement.

And, as in years past, we went over. The 20 are actually 22 because of two double profiles that reflect how important teamwork is in the industry. As one of our honorees, Joe Illingworth of DJS Antibodies, told me in our interview, “It takes a village to raise a biotech.”

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FDA ap­proves Lex­i­con’s heart-fail­ure drug af­ter de­feat in di­a­betes

The FDA on Friday approved Lexicon’s heart failure drug sotagliflozin following a string of setbacks for the pharma company, including an FDA rejection in diabetes and the loss of a development deal with Sanofi.

The dual SGLT1 and SGLT2 inhibitor will be marketed as Inpefa and is a once-daily tablet. It’s been approved to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death and heart failure-related hospitalization or urgent visits in adults with heart failure or type 2 diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, and other cardiovascular risk factors. The label spans the range of left ventricular ejection fraction, including preserved ejection fraction and reduced ejection fraction, as well as patients with or without diabetes, Lexicon said Friday.

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Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion to re­ceive few­er Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech vac­cine dos­es un­der amend­ed con­tract

The European Commission has made a few changes to its vaccine contract with Pfizer and BioNTech, reducing the dose volume while extending the delivery timeline to cope with “evolving public health needs.”

The Commission previously struck a contract in May 2021 for 900 million doses, with the option to purchase another 900 million. Of those, 450 million were expected to be delivered in 2023, though an amendment now calls for fewer doses. While neither the Commission nor Pfizer and BioNTech have revealed an exact amount, an unnamed source told Reuters that the amendment reduces the remaining expected doses by about a third.

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Bench­Sci rais­es $70M Se­ries D for drug dis­cov­ery soft­ware; Zen­tal­is touts PhIb ovar­i­an can­cer da­ta

Canada’s BenchSci has raised $70 million in a Series D round designed to scale its AI drug discovery platform for scientists working in preclinical research.

The company boasts thousands of clients for its software, including 16 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. On the platform, researchers can get a digest of AI’s summary of medical, clinical and research data — helping them spot biological connections and choose among thousands of options with, say, a reagent or antibody.

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