When Pro­tal­ix Bio­Ther­a­peu­tics re­port­ed its 2018 re­sults this March, it spent much of its time talk­ing up the po­ten­tial of nab­bing an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval for its Fab­ry dis­ease treat­ment pe­gu­ni­gal­si­dase al­fa.

Weeks lat­er, the Is­raeli biotech — which has an un­ap­pe­tiz­ing pen­ny stock val­u­a­tion $PLX — and part­ner Chiesi are go­ing for it, op­ti­mistic af­ter months of dis­cus­sion with the FDA. The BLA fil­ing is sched­uled for Q1 2020.

Like Shire’s Re­pla­gal, which it’s be­ing com­pared against in a pair of late-stage tri­als, pe­gu­ni­gal­si­dase al­fa (or PRX-102) is an en­zyme re­place­ment ther­a­py de­signed to break down the ex­cess fat mol­e­cules build­ing up in Fab­ry pa­tients. Syn­the­sized from plants, this par­tic­u­lar re­com­bi­nant al­pha-galac­tosi­dase A en­zyme can be in­fused every four weeks in­stead of Re­pla­gal’s two.

An ini­tial glimpse of the Phase III study showed that high lev­els of the drug cir­cu­lat­ed in the blood­stream af­ter 28 days, with a mean con­cen­tra­tion of 138 ng/mL among 15 evalu­able pa­tients. In con­trast, Fab­razyme — an­oth­er ERT de­vel­oped by Sanofi Gen­zyme — had his­tor­i­cal­ly shown a mean con­cen­tra­tion of 20 ng/mL at 10 hours post in­fu­sion, HC Wain­wright an­a­lysts added in a Feb­ru­ary note.

But those are not the on­ly com­peti­tors Pro­tal­ix will face. Am­i­cus has trav­eled down its own wind­ing path to an ap­proval for Galafold, an oral drug that works by ad­dress­ing some mis­fold­ed α-GalA en­zymes. New ther­a­pies to in­tro­duce healthy copies of the GLA gene, which en­codes for the en­zyme, are com­ing up in the pipeline, with a no­table ef­fort from Avro­bio.

“This reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval path is a sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment as it means that we can start the ap­pli­ca­tion process and po­ten­tial­ly at­tain mar­ket ap­proval sig­nif­i­cant­ly ear­li­er than the ini­tial plan of da­ta from our on­go­ing phase III BAL­ANCE clin­i­cal tri­al,” CEO Moshe Manor said in a state­ment. “We plan to con­tin­ue the BAL­ANCE study to fur­ther strength­en the pro­file of pe­gu­ni­gal­si­dase al­fa.”

Chiesi holds the US rights to the drug from a deal that looped in $760 mil­lion in reg­u­la­to­ry and com­mer­cial mile­stones. Pro­tal­ix cur­rent­ly has one ap­proved prod­uct for Gauch­er dis­ease, mar­ket­ed by Pfiz­er.

That 2012 ap­proval, though, has done lit­tle to lift Pro­tal­ix’s suf­fer­ing stock af­ter a con­found­ing de­ci­sion in 2007 to price a sec­ondary of­fer­ing at an 85% dis­count to its trad­ing price the day pri­or. Shares plum­met­ed from $35 to $5 overnight and has bare­ly gone over $10 since, trad­ing way be­low $1 these days.

So­cial im­age: Shut­ter­stock

As Congress considers whether to adopt sweeping new legislation to lower prescription drug prices across the board, the Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a new report on Monday showing how a more targeted approach on a subset of drugs might be a more efficient way to save government funds.

“This analysis shows that Medicare Part D and Part B spending is highly concentrated among a relatively small share of covered drugs, mainly those without generic or biosimilar competitors,” wrote Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, and Tricia Neuman, SVP of KFF. “Focusing drug price negotiation or reference pricing on a subset of drugs that account for a disproportionate share of spending would be an efficient use of administrative resources, though it would also leave some potential savings on the table.”

After a turbulent couple of years, Ovid is officially doing away with a program it had once championed in the face of heavy analyst skepticism.

Ovid has discontinued development of OV101, or gaboxadol, in Angelman syndrome and will not pursue further clinical trials for Fragile X syndrome, the company announced Monday morning. The news comes after Ovid had previously paused development in Angelman when the compound flunked a Phase III trial in December.

Close to a year-and-a-half after tapping the brakes on one of its preclinical programs to do some added genetic engineering work on their next-gen CAR-T, Anixa $ANIX Therapeutics says the regulatory light is flashing red on their IND.

The San Jose, CA-based biotech — which changed its name from ITUS in 2018 — explained in late 2019 that they were taking a knee for at least a year so that researchers could go back and amp up the expression of follicle stimulating hormone on T cells to improve targeting of the FSH receptor on a specific set of ovarian cells. That required new vector engineering work by their partners at Moffitt Cancer Center.

It’s always a surprise when a court has to step in to tell the FDA that it erred in performing one of its main duties: classifying whether a medical product is drug or a device.

But that’s what the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did on Friday, making clear to the world’s top drug regulator that Genus Medical Technologies’ contrast agent barium sulfate (also known as Vanilla SilQ) should not be considered a drug, as the FDA had said, but a medical device.