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

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.