→ Dana-Far­ber is lend­ing a hand to lit­tle On­coSec’s nascent ef­fort to de­vel­op CAR-T ther­a­pies for sol­id tu­mor can­cers. The San Diego biotech has worked out an ex­clu­sive li­cens­ing deal with Wayne Maras­co — an ex­pert in an­ti­body en­gi­neer­ing — to ap­ply his method of link­ing two sin­gle-chain vari­able frag­ment (scFv) in a bis­pe­cif­ic CAR-T such that the T cells are on­ly ac­ti­vat­ed when both tar­gets are en­gaged, there­by lim­it­ing off-tu­mor tox­i­c­i­ty. On­coSec’s fi­nan­cial con­tri­bu­tion in the re­search, which in­volves test­ing the ex­per­i­men­tal treat­ment so­lo and in com­bi­na­tion with Ta­vo in triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cer, will be “mod­est” and spread over sev­er­al years, CEO Daniel O’Con­nor said.

→ Af­ter win­ning the FDA nod for low blood platelet count (throm­bo­cy­tope­nia) in adults with chron­ic liv­er dis­ease (CLD) who are sched­uled to un­der­go a med­ical or den­tal pro­ce­dure, the la­bel of Do­va Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal’s Doptelet on Thurs­day was ex­pand­ed to in­clude pa­tients with chron­ic im­mune throm­bo­cy­tope­nia (ITP) who have had an in­suf­fi­cient re­sponse to a pre­vi­ous treat­ment. The com­pa­ny’s shares $DO­VA leapt about 27.5% to $13.50 in morn­ing trad­ing. The FDA’s en­dorse­ment comes about a week af­ter Eu­ro­pean reg­u­la­tors al­so backed the drug for use in se­vere throm­bo­cy­tope­nia in adult pa­tients with CLD who are sched­uled to un­der­go an in­va­sive pro­ce­dure. Mean­while, late-stage da­ta from a study eval­u­at­ing the drug’s use in chemother­a­py-in­duced throm­bo­cy­tope­nia are ex­pect­ed in the first half of 2020.

→ The re­cent­ly-pub­lic Ver­ri­ca Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals‘ $VR­CA ex­per­i­men­tal drug, VP-102, has cleared a mid-stage study in pa­tients with com­mon warts. The drug’s “ef­fi­ca­cy and tol­er­a­bil­i­ty has been fur­ther con­firmed with the pos­i­tive Phase II COVE-1 tri­al in com­mon warts, and is now de-risked in an ad­di­tion­al in­di­ca­tion. We be­lieve this pro­vides ad­di­tion­al (and not mod­eled) up­side for VR­CA as our val­u­a­tion tar­gets are based pure­ly on VP-102 in mol­lus­cum con­ta­gio­sum which re­mains on track for a po­ten­tial H2:2020 launch,” Cowen an­a­lysts wrote in a note. The com­pa­ny said it is on track to sub­mit an ap­pli­ca­tion to mar­ket the drug for pa­tients with mol­lus­cum con­ta­gio­sum — a vi­ral skin in­fec­tion some­times called wa­ter warts — lat­er this year.

About five years ago, Amit Etkin had a breakthrough.

The Stanford neurologist, a soft-spoken demi-prodigy who became a professor while still a resident, had been obsessed for a decade with how to better define psychiatric disorders. Drugs for depression or bipolar disorder didn’t work for many patients with the conditions, and he suspected the reason was how traditional diagnoses didn’t actually get at the heart of what was going on in a patient’s brain.

While falling behind the biggest PD-(L)1 drugs in terms of sales, Roche has looked to carve out a space for its Tecentriq with a growing expertise in lung cancer. The drug will now take an early lead in the sought-after adjuvant setting — but competitors are on the way.

The FDA on Friday approved Tecentriq as an adjuvant therapy for patients with Stage II-IIIA non small cell lung cancer with PD-(L)1 scores greater than or equal to 1, making it the first drug of its kind approved in an early setting that covers around 40% of all NSCLC patients.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Friday voted 19-0 in favor of authorizing a second shot of J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine to follow at least two months after the initial dose.

Regulators don’t have to follow VRBPAC’s recommendation, but they almost always do. Considering that the CDC’s advisory committee has already been set to review the expanded EUA, VRBPAC’s recommendation is likely to be adopted.

The FDA has another adcomm coming down the pipeline — this time on Covid-19 oral antiviral molnupiravir.

The federal agency’s advisory committee will meet on November 30th to go over Merck and Ridgeback’s EUA request for their investigational antiviral drug, and discuss the available data supporting its use in Covid-19 patients.

This comes two weeks after Merck claimed that their antiviral pill reduced the chance that newly diagnosed Covid-19 patients would be hospitalized or die by 50%. The pharma made the announcement after interim data on 775 patients in their clinical trial showed the antiviral’s potential.