It’s been a roller coast­er few months for Be­yond­Spring Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals — and the New York-based biotech is now ask­ing a third of its staffers to alight the train ear­ly.

Be­yond­Spring is chop­ping its US work­force by 35%, with some of those em­ploy­ees be­ing as­signed to sub­sidiaries, in a move de­scribed as “or­ga­ni­za­tion­al stream­lin­ing” im­ple­ment­ed to “pre­serve long-term sus­tain­abil­i­ty.”

The low-pro­file biotech found it­self in a sud­den spot­light back in Au­gust af­ter re­leas­ing sur­pris­ing­ly pos­i­tive Phase III re­sults sug­gest­ing its off­beat ap­proach to im­munother­a­py could ex­tend the over­all sur­vival of non-small cell lung can­cer pa­tients. But the sky­rock­et­ing shares came crash­ing down a few months lat­er when the FDA re­ject­ed the same drug for a dif­fer­ent in­di­ca­tion, dash­ing its im­me­di­ate hopes for a mar­ket en­try.

Not much is ex­act­ly chang­ing at Be­yond­Spring, where the plinab­u­lin fran­chise will re­main the core fo­cus.

A se­lec­tive im­munomod­u­lat­ing mi­cro­tubule-bind­ing agent de­rived from sea­weed, the drug was ini­tial­ly test­ed, in com­bi­na­tion with a G-CSF ana­log, for the pre­ven­tion of chemother­a­py-in­duced neu­trope­nia (a con­di­tion marked by dan­ger­ous­ly low lev­els of cer­tain white blood cells lead­ing to height­ened risk of in­fec­tion).

With da­ta from on­ly one tri­al, though, the FDA deemed Be­yond­Spring’s pack­age “not suf­fi­cient­ly ro­bust to demon­strate ben­e­fit” and asked for a sec­ond well-con­trolled tri­al in its com­plete re­sponse let­ter.

The com­pa­ny sug­gest­ed it will con­tin­ue to push for a CIN ap­proval in Chi­na and the US, while gear­ing up for an NDA fil­ing of the NSCLC in­di­ca­tion af­ter stun­ning in­vestors with what one an­a­lyst called “VERY un­ex­pect­ed” da­ta.

In a Phase III tri­al in­volv­ing 559 pa­tients, the com­pa­ny re­port­ed that near­ly twice as many pa­tients were alive af­ter two years on the drug arm than on the stan­dard-of-care arm. And by year four, 10.6% of pa­tients who re­ceived plinab­u­lin plus chemo were alive, com­pared to none of the pa­tients who re­ceived place­bo plus chemo.

Those re­sults drew Chi­nese on­col­o­gy gi­ant Jiang­su Hen­grui to ink a $170 mil­lion de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion pact. But as Be­yond­Spring re­leased more de­tailed da­ta, out­side on­col­o­gists al­so raised ques­tions about the mag­ni­tude of the ben­e­fit and whether it may have been dri­ven in part by some pa­tients in the tri­al re­ceiv­ing “sub­stan­dard” care.

It’s now time to hun­ker down and de­liv­er on those promis­es, in­clud­ing test­ing plinab­u­lin in oth­er I/O com­bos — while the oth­er pre­clin­i­cal pro­grams go on the back­burn­er.

“This re­or­ga­ni­za­tion will en­able Be­yond­Spring to re­duce op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es and ex­tend its cash run­way,” CEO Lan Huang said in a state­ment.

Amgen is the latest pharma company to appear on the radar of Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is investigating the way pharma companies are using subsidiaries in low- or zero-tax countries to lower their tax bills.

Like its peers Merck, AbbVie and Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyden notes how Amgen uses its Puerto Rico operations to consistently pay tax rates that are substantially lower than the U.S. corporate tax rate of 21%, with an effective tax rate of 10.7% in 2020 and 12.1% in 2021.

After controversially spinning out its talc liabilities and filing for bankruptcy in an attempt to settle 38,000 lawsuits, Johnson & Johnson is now changing up the formula for its baby powder products.

J&J is beginning the transition to an all cornstarch-based baby powder portfolio, the pharma giant announced on Thursday — just months after a federal judge ruled in favor of its “Texas two-step” bankruptcy to settle allegations that its talc products contained asbestos and caused cancer. An appeals court has since agreed to revisit that case.

Eli Lilly has found a new chief commercial officer from among the ranks at Bristol Myers Squibb, as it says farewell to its longtime head of human resources Stephen Fry.

Fry announced on Thursday his plans to retire after more than 35 years with Lilly. He’ll vacate his seat as SVP of human resources and diversity at the end of the year, and current Loxo CCO Eric Dozier is slated to take his place. As a result, BMS’ Winselow Tucker is joining the team as Loxo CCO at the end of the month.