Po­sei­da pitch­es a $115M IPO on its claim that the sci­ence team has cre­at­ed a bet­ter BC­MA CAR-T

Is there enough en­thu­si­asm among biotech in­vestors to push through a $115 mil­lion-plus IPO on the lat­est biotech stak­ing out their claim with a new-and-im­proved BC­MA CAR-T ther­a­py?

Po­sei­da Ther­a­peu­tics is aim­ing to find that out in the very near fu­ture.

Er­ic Os­tertag

The San Diego-based biotech filed their S-1 on a busy Fri­day, just ahead of the big JP­Mor­gan con­fab that gets un­der­way Mon­day morn­ing in San Fran­cis­co. In it, they lay out an ear­ly snap­shot on Phase I da­ta for P-BC­MA-101 tar­get­ing mul­ti­ple myelo­ma — a fa­mil­iar tar­get in the CAR-T world these days.

Ac­cord­ing to the fil­ing, re­searchers have tracked 14 clin­i­cal re­spons­es among the first 19 pa­tients in their first hu­man study. And they in­clud­ed in that ORR every sign of ac­tiv­i­ty, from a com­plete re­sponse all the way through to a “min­i­mal re­sponse.” They al­so flagged CRs in 3 of 3 pa­tients get­ting the dose they plan to take in­to Phase II. And they down­played some se­ri­ous ad­verse events as like­ly linked to lym­phode­ple­tion, used to prep pa­tients for the drug.

The Phase II gets un­der­way in the first half of this year, and they’re plan­ning to push for an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval on that study. No, the FDA has not signed off on that plan, but it wouldn’t be wild­ly un­rea­son­able to ex­pect that they might.

The rest of the pipeline is pre­clin­i­cal.

The way the orig­i­nal CAR-T works is pret­ty sim­ple. You take a pa­tient’s cell and adapt it, adding chimeric anti­gen re­cep­tors to di­rect T cells to can­cer. Po­sei­da is sell­ing its IPO on the as­ser­tion that they’ve de­vel­oped bet­ter tech to do the same job, us­ing a DNA mod­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem that they say will se­lect more mem­o­ry T cells to do the work, which should make them more durable.

That’s the pitch, but they haven’t proved it yet.

Po­sei­da is rolling ahead in­to a tur­bu­lent stock mar­ket, where con­cerns about an eco­nom­ic slow­down and a trade war with Chi­na have tak­en a heavy toll on tech stocks. An­oth­er big con­cern: Mod­er­na $MR­NA was not able to hold on to its lofty mar­ket val­u­a­tion af­ter go­ing pub­lic, rais­ing con­cerns that in­vestors have grown tired of see­ing too many biotechs with too lit­tle da­ta to back up these of­fer­ings.

That en­vi­ron­ment will make this IPO and oth­ers filed re­cent­ly ones to watch.

Ma­lin Life Sci­ences out of Ire­land has the biggest stake in the biotech, at 33%. CEO Er­ic Os­tertag’s trust holds 15% while Ti­tan LLC has 13.6% of the stock and Lon­gi­tude Ven­ture Part­ners III holds 7.7%.

Os­tertag’s back­ground in­cludes found­ing Trans­posagen, based in Lex­ing­ton, KY. That com­pa­ny has been work­ing with gene edit­ing tech and cell reengi­neer­ing for year. Po­sei­da is a spin­out of that com­pa­ny, us­ing much the same tech, with an eye to de­vel­op­ing off-the-shelf cell ther­a­pies as well.

Has the mo­ment fi­nal­ly ar­rived for val­ue-based health­care?

RBC Capital Markets’ Healthcare Technology Analyst, Sean Dodge, spotlights a new breed of tech-enabled providers who are rapidly transforming the way clinicians deliver healthcare, and explores the key question: can this accelerating revolution overturn the US healthcare system?

Key points

Tech-enabled healthcare providers are poised to help the US transition to value, not volume, as the basis for reward.
The move to value-based care has policy momentum, but is risky and complex for clinicians.
Outsourced tech specialists are emerging to provide the required expertise, while healthcare and tech are also converging through M&A.
Value-based care remains in its early stages, but the transition is accelerating and represents a huge addressable market.

NIH re­jects an­oth­er at­tempt to 'march-in' on prostate can­cer drug over ex­ces­sive price

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has declined to use so-called “march-in” rights to lower the price of Astellas’ prostate cancer drug Xtandi even as the federal government helped to pay for its development.

NIH told prostate cancer patients Robert Sachs and Clare Love, in a letter shared with Endpoints News, the institutes’ analyses found Xtandi “to be widely available to the public” and “given the remaining patent life and the lengthy administrative process involved for a march-in proceeding, NIH does not believe that use of the march-in authority would be an effective means of lowering the price of the drug.”

Andy Plump, Takeda R&D chief (Jeff Rumans for Endpoints News)

What kind of PhI­Ib da­ta is worth $4B cash? Take­da’s Andy Plump has some thoughts on that

A few months back, when Takeda caused jaws to drop with its eye-watering $4 billion cash upfront for a mid-stage TYK2 drug from Nimbus, it had already taken a deep dive on the solid Phase IIb data Nimbus had assembled from its dose-ranging study in psoriasis.

Now, it’s rolling that data out, eager to demonstrate what inspired the global biopharma to go long in a neighboring, but new, disease arena for the pipeline. And the most avid students of the numbers will likely be at Bristol Myers Squibb, who will have a multi-year head start on pioneering the TYK2 space with Sotyktu (deucravacitinib) as Takeda makes its lunge for best-in-class status.

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No­vo Nordisk re­mains un­der UK scruti­ny as MHRA con­ducts its own re­view in 'in­cred­i­bly rare' case

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is now reviewing Novo Nordisk’s marketing violation that resulted in its loss of UK trade group membership last week. Novo Nordisk was suspended on Thursday from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) for two years after an investigation by its regulatory arm found the pharma broke its conduct rules.

MHRA said on Tuesday that its review of the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) investigation is standard practice. An MHRA spokesperson emphasized in an email to Endpoints News that the situation with Novo Nordisk is “incredibly rare” while also noting ABPI took “swift and proportionate action.”

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FDA in­di­cates will­ing­ness to ap­prove Bio­gen ALS drug de­spite failed PhI­II study

Ahead of Wednesday’s advisory committee hearing to discuss Biogen’s ALS drug tofersen, the FDA appeared open to approving the drug, newly released briefing documents show.

Citing the need for flexibility in a devastating disease like ALS, regulators signaled a willingness to consider greenlighting tofersen based on its effect on a certain protein associated with ALS despite a failed pivotal trial. The documents come after regulatory flexibility was part of the same rationale the agency expressed when approving an ALS drug last September from Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, indicating the FDA’s openness to approving new treatments for the disease.

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FDA warns Proc­ter & Gam­ble over NyQuil la­bel's in­gre­di­ent list­ings

The FDA on Tuesday released a warning letter sent earlier this month to the Mason, OH-based site of Procter & Gamble Manufactura, raising questions about the list of ingredients on the label and in the electronic filing.

The warning says that for P&G’s over-the-counter Vicks Nyquil Severe Hot Remedy Cold and Flu Plus Congestion, there’s a “mismatched” list of active ingredients between the labeling and the electronic listing file. The listing file for the active ingredients did not match the active ingredients in the electronic file.

Mar­ket­ingRx roundup: What could a US Tik­Tok ban mean for phar­ma? Pfiz­er, Lil­ly lead phar­ma March Mad­ness ad­ver­tis­ers

Just as pharma marketers finally make moves into TikTok, the threat of a US ban on the social media channel is now looming. Already banned on federal employee phones by an initial Congressional act, more bills and maybe bans are on the way. With rare bipartisan agreement, lawmakers have introduced legislation that would give the US president the power to ban TikTok (although not mentioned by name) and other foreign-owned technology platforms that represent a security threat to the US.

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Chat­G­PT with phar­ma da­ta de­buts for med­ical meet­ings, be­gin­ning with AACR

What do you get when you combine ChatGPT generative AI technology with specific pharma and clinical datasets? A time-saving tool that can answer questions about medical conference abstracts and clinical findings in seconds in one new application from ZoomRx called FermaGPT.

ZoomRx is debuting a public version of its generative AI product specifically for medical conferences beginning this week for the upcoming American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting that runs April 14-19.

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Vipin Garg, Altimmune CEO

Al­tim­mune’s shares halved af­ter in­ter­im look at PhII weight loss drug da­ta

Altimmune’s attempt to catch up to Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drugs hit an investor snag Tuesday after the biotech shared interim Phase II weight loss data.

The Maryland biotech’s pemvidutide is a GLP-1/glucagon dual receptor agonist meant to activate GLP-1 receptors to squash appetite and glucagon to ramp up energy use. The 2.4 mg dose showed a placebo-adjusted weight loss of 9.7% at week 24 of 48, which Jefferies analysts said would be comparable to Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide (Wegovy) and Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide (Mounjaro).

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