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.

Bristol Myers Squibb recently joined 11 of its peer pharma companies in limiting how many contract pharmacies can access certain drugs discounted by a federal program known as 340B.

Bristol Myers is just the latest in a series of high-profile pharma companies moving in their own direction as the Biden administration’s Health Resources and Services Administration struggles to rein in the drug discount program for the neediest Americans.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying so hard to politicize the FDA and demonize the federal government that he entered into an alternate universe on Monday evening in describing a recent FDA action to restrict the use of two monoclonal antibody, or mAb, treatments for Covid-19 that don’t work against Omicron.

Without further ado, let’s break down his statement from last night, line by line, adjective by adjective.

Amgen wanted to know how people with asthma really felt about daily life with the disease. So it bought a promoted tweet on Twitter noting the not-so-simple realities of life with asthma and ended the post with a #DearAsthma hashtag, a megaphone emoji and a re-tweet button.

That was just over one week ago and the responses haven’t stopped. More than 7,000 posts so far on Twitter replied to #DearAsthma to detail struggles of daily life, expressing humor, frustration and sometimes anger. More than a few f-bombs have been typed or gif-ed in reply to communicate just how much many people “hate” the disease.