Stephen Hahn’s nom­i­na­tion as the new com­mis­sion­er of the FDA was de­liv­ered right on sched­ule Fri­day, with the clock tick­ing down on the No­vem­ber 1 dead­line Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump faced in find­ing a per­ma­nent re­place­ment for Scott Got­tlieb. The pend­ing news had be­come the worst kept se­cret in Wash­ing­ton. But the full mean­ing of the move is still un­de­ter­mined.

The Chief Med­ical Ex­ec­u­tive at MD An­der­son had a rep for steer­ing straight in­to con­fronta­tion, when the fu­ture of the in­sti­tu­tion was at stake. More prob­lem­at­ic, per­haps, will be his role in dis­miss­ing Chi­nese re­searchers at a time the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has been bear­ing down on the Asian gi­ant. Just how Hahn will man­age drug de­vel­op­ment, which is my pri­ma­ry are­na of in­ter­est, is go­ing to take some time to fig­ure out.

In­ter­im chief Ned Sharp­less was the clear in­sti­tu­tion­al fa­vorite for get­ting the job full time af­ter a stint at the NCI. Pa­tient groups loved him and the in­dus­try deeply re­spect­ed his ex­per­tise, even if he nev­er gen­er­at­ed the kind of en­thu­si­asm Scott Got­tlieb achieved at the agency’s helm as the first com­mis­sion­er with re­al celebri­ty sta­tus.

As the process to con­firm Dr. Hahn be­gins, I will re­turn to @theN­CI to re­sume my role as @NCIDi­rec­tor. I am con­fi­dent Dr. Hahn will pro­vide strong lead­er­ship for the FDA. https://t.co/3vc­syj7Pf4

— Dr. Ned Sharp­less (@FDA­Com­mis­sion­er) No­vem­ber 1, 2019

Hahn’s nom­i­na­tion, though, won’t trig­ger any ob­vi­ous back­lash in bio­phar­ma. As a re­spect­ed ex­ec­u­tive at MD An­der­son with a track record in re­search and a ca­reer in on­col­o­gy that ex­tend­ed back through a stint at the pres­ti­gious Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia’s Perel­man School of Med­i­cine, he’ll be ex­pect­ed to main­tain the gold stan­dard in drug de­vel­op­ment.

Mar­garet Foti, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of AACR, set the tone with a pre­pared com­ment for the oc­ca­sion:

Dr. Hahn, who is board cer­ti­fied in both ra­di­a­tion and med­ical on­col­o­gy, is es­teemed for the breadth and depth of his sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and ex­per­tise, and he has con­sis­tent­ly ad­vo­cat­ed for a drug re­view process at the FDA that is both sci­ence-di­rect­ed and pa­tient-fo­cused.

The ques­tion is whether he’ll keep push­ing the en­ve­lope on greater reg­u­la­to­ry flex­i­bil­i­ty that has helped rev­o­lu­tion­ize can­cer drug de­vel­op­ment and changed the dy­nam­ics of R&D.

That’s some­thing no one seems to know much about. But they’ll get a chance to hear much more once the Sen­ate picks up the nom­i­na­tion.

Fewer Approvals, but Neurology Rivals Oncology and Sees Major Innovations

This report, the fourth in our Trinity Drug Index series, outlines key themes and emerging trends in the industry as we progress towards a new world of targeted and innovative products. It provides a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of novel drugs approved by the FDA in 2016, scoring each on its commercial performance, therapeutic value, and R&D investment (Table 1: Drug ranking – Ratings on a 1-5 scale).

For start-up biotechnology companies and resource stretched pharmaceutical organisations, launching a novel product can be challenging. Lean teams can make setting a launch strategy and achieving your commercial goals seem like a colossal undertaking, but can these barriers be transformed into opportunities that work to your brand’s advantage?
We spoke to Managing Consultant Frances Hendry to find out how Blue Latitude Health partnered with a fledgling subsidiary of a pharmaceutical organisation to launch an innovative product in a
complex market.
What does the launch environment look like for this product?
FH: We started working on the product at Phase II and now we’re going into Phase III trials. There is a significant unmet need in this disease area, and everyone is excited about the launch. However, the organisation is still evolving and the team is quite small – naturally this causes a little turbulence.

Roche’s Kadcyla has become the first antibody-drug conjugate to enter the Chinese market, marking a dramatic advance for both the Swiss pharma giant and the therapeutic class.

The local arm of Roche announced the approval late Tuesday, which covers the therapy’s use in the adjuvant setting in patients with early HER-2 positive breast cancer who still have residual invasive disease after receiving paclitaxel and Herceptin as neoadjuvant treatment.

Pascal Soriot has spent more than 20 years at the top of an industry recently found to emit more carbon than the automotive industry.

He called himself a “global citizen,” and traveled often across three-plus continents. While CEO of AstraZeneca, he commissioned a flight service — media-dubbed AstraZeneca airlines — from Cambridge to the company’s other European hub in Gothenburg. He made few, if any, public statements on the environment or his companies’ impact on it.

With an FDA decision date looming, Roche on Wednesday unveiled positive pivotal data on its blockbuster-bound oral spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) drug in patients with the most severe form of the muscle-wasting disease.

The FDA is set to make its decision on the therapy, risdiplam, by May 24. It is expected to compete with Biogen’s Spinraza and Novartis’ Zolgensma.

Partnered with PTC Therapeutics, the Roche drug was tested in 41 patients aged 1-7 months with type 1 SMA, a rare genetic muscle-wasting disease. The trial, dubbed FIREFISH, measured efficacy via the proportion of infants sitting without support after 12 months of treatment, and longer.

Every few years, a public health crisis (think Ebola, Zika) spurred by a rogue pathogen triggers a small-biotech rally, as drugmakers emerge from the woodwork with ambitious plans to treat the mounting outbreak. In most cases, that enthusiasm never quite delivers.

Things are no different, as the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China takes hold. There have been close to 300 confirmed human infections in China, and at least four deaths. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, which include MERS and SARS. On Tuesday, the CDC reported the virus was detected in a US traveler returning from Wuhan.