The tri­al may be on hold, but No­var­tis says the drug works.

No­var­tis an­nounced to­day new da­ta on a de­liv­ery route to make the gene ther­a­py Zol­gens­ma ap­plic­a­ble and ac­ces­si­ble to old­er kids with spinal mus­cu­lar at­ro­phy, even as the Phase I/II tri­al on that route re­mains on hold. The FDA paused the tri­al in Oc­to­ber af­ter pre­clin­i­cal stud­ies showed loss of neur­al func­tion in some mice. The hold came af­ter an in­dus­try-rock­ing scan­dal over how No­var­tis han­dled da­ta-tam­per­ing in a dif­fer­ent set of pre­clin­i­cal Zol­gens­ma stud­ies.

No­var­tis sub­sidiary AveX­is, which de­vel­oped and mar­kets Zol­gens­ma, said that in the me­di­an dos­ing arm of their STRONG tri­al, the 2-year-old to 5-year-old pa­tients met the pri­ma­ry end­point: They im­proved an av­er­age of 6.0 points on the Ham­mer­smith Func­tion­al Mo­tor Scale-Ex­pand­ed, a met­ric used to mea­sure mus­cle func­tion in kids with spinal mus­cu­lar at­ro­phy. AveX­is said that was twice the im­prove­ment re­quired to be clin­i­cal­ly mean­ing­ful and re­flect­ed ad­vances in three to six mo­tor skills.

David Lennon No­var­tis

In a press re­lease, AveX­is CEO David Lennon praised the re­sults and hint­ed he hoped they would con­vince reg­u­la­tors to re­sume the tri­al. He used the ex­per­i­men­tal com­pa­ny name of the drug.

“STRONG da­ta demon­strat­ed po­ten­tial best-in-cat­e­go­ry pro­file with re­mark­able mo­tor func­tion im­prove­ment fol­low­ing a sin­gle, one-time in­trathe­cal dose,” Lennon said. “We look for­ward to shar­ing these da­ta with reg­u­la­tors to fur­ther our dis­cus­sions to­ward reg­is­tra­tion of in­trathe­cal AVXS-101.”

Ap­proved last year, Zol­gens­ma was the sec­ond gene ther­a­py to reach the mar­ket in the US and just the sec­ond-ever treat­ment for spinal mus­cu­lar at­ro­phy af­ter the 2016 ap­proval of Io­n­is’s and Bio­gen’s Spin­raza. The ther­a­py was lim­it­ed, though, to pa­tients un­der the age of 2. The swift­ness of the ge­net­ic dis­or­ders re­duced the odds of suc­cess the old­er pa­tients got. Most kids with SMA type 1 — the first ap­proved in­di­ca­tion — do not live past the age of 2.

Peo­ple with SMA type 2, how­ev­er, can live in­to ear­ly adult­hood, and No­var­tis has been try­ing to test if an in­trathe­cal in­jec­tion of  Zol­gens­ma — as op­posed to an in­tra­venous one — can im­prove their prog­no­sis.

The hold on the tri­al af­fect­ed the high­est dos­ing arm of the study. Since Oc­to­ber, the Swiss gi­ant has tried to get the FDA to lift the halt, point­ing to the fact that the neur­al dam­age shown in the pre­clin­i­cal study has nev­er ap­peared across the 300-plus pa­tients who have re­ceived the gene ther­a­py. The com­pa­ny said they ex­pect a de­ci­sion from the FDA next quar­ter.

Can a Chinese biotech deliver the first new lupus drug in decades? A high-profile group of VCs are betting on it.

Lilly Asia Ventures and Lake Bleu Capital are the co-headliners for RemeGen’s latest raise, which brought in more than $100 million. Hudson Bay Capital and Vivo Capital — which, like LAV, also invested in a pre-IPO round for Legend Biotech unveiled today — chimed in, as did Janchor Partners and OrbiMed.

Months after GSK’s Nucala cleared in a pivotal rare blood disorder study, the asthma biologic has scored in a late-stage trial in chronic rhinosinusitis patients with nasal polyps.

The British drugmaker on Friday disclosed data from the SYNAPSE study, which tested Nucala (also known as mepolizumab) against a placebo on top of standard-of-care in more than 400 patients, all of whom had a history of previous surgery (approximately one in three had ≥3 surgeries) and required surgery due to severe symptoms and bigger polyps.

→ Rip Ballou, who until very recently led vaccine research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, is joining the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) to lead its USAID-funded ADVANCE program. The program uses a network of researchers and institutions in Africa to help develop a vaccine for HIV. Ballou had worked at GSK since 2010 and has led global vaccine R&D since 2015. Prior to that he held posts at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a different post at GSK, Medimmune, and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.  IAVI is led by Mark Feinberg, the former CSO of Merck Vaccines. 

Last month Nanjing Legend Biotech revealed that it sees, and was quietly planning for, a future as a public company in the US, separate but still tied to its former parent, Chinese CRO GenScript. It’s evidently a vision that enticed investors, drawing marquee names for a pre-IPO round.

The Series A fetched a whopping $150.5 million from Hudson Bay Capital Management, Lilly Asia Ventures, Vivo Capital, RA Capital Management and JJDC, the venture arm of J&J. The pharma giant has helped fund Legend’s CAR-T work with the $350 million upfront payment it handed over to partner on the lead BCMA program.

Developing new drugs is incredibly hard. That’s why, despite superhuman efforts from the industry, we’re still looking at 12-18 months minimum before we can realistically hope for a vaccine for Covid-19, and probably months before there’s a proven viable drug treatment.

But our increasing ability to begin to industrialize the drug discovery and development process through an engineering approach means that we have more hope for speeding up this process than ever before — and not just to defeat coronavirus, but to benefit the development of all new medicines in the future.