J&J tells End­points News that a bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­body it is part­nered on with Gen­mab for acute myeloid leukemia has been put on clin­i­cal hold af­ter pa­tients in the tri­al suf­fered se­ri­ous ad­verse events.

The drug, JNJ-63709178, tar­gets both CD3 and CD123 and was in an ear­ly stage study when the hold was in­sti­tut­ed, forc­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tors to sus­pend pa­tient re­cruit­ment, ac­cord­ing to the clin­i­cal­tri­als.gov web site. The com­plete hold, which should stop dos­ing, fol­lowed.

A spokesper­son for J&J con­firmed the news, but de­clined to say just what ad­verse events were seen in the study.

“Janssen R&D tem­porar­i­ly sus­pend­ed the study on Aug 8; the FDA put it on com­plete clin­i­cal hold ef­fec­tive Aug 16,” says the com­pa­ny spokesper­son.  “We’re work­ing with the FDA now to ad­dress rec­om­mend­ed changes to the study.  At this point, we don’t have any ad­di­tion­al de­tails to share.  We’re hop­ing to re­sume the study with ap­pro­pri­ate guid­ance from the FDA.”

News of the clin­i­cal hold was first raised in a tweet from Eval­u­ate Phar­ma’s Ja­cob Pli­eth.

Se­vere ad­verse event -> sus­pen­sion of $JNJ $GEN CD123 bis­pe­cif­ic JNJ-63709178. (H/t Nordea) $NVS $XN­CR $MGNX $CLLS pic.twit­ter.com/4q2bTAhv2d

— Ja­cob Pli­eth (@Ja­cob­Pli­eth) Sep­tem­ber 19, 2016

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

Everything came up sevens for GlaxoSmithKline on Thursday as the pharma notched the seventh PD-1 approval seven years after the first such drugs were OK’ed in Keytruda and Opdivo. But will it bring GSK good fortune?

The FDA granted accelerated approval to dostarlimab, to be branded Jemperli, to treat recurrent or advanced endometrial cancer in a specific subset of patients following platinum-based chemo. It’s a drug that came to GSK through its buyout of Tesaro, which it snapped up for $5.1 billion back in December 2018.

Although Thursday’s Senate health committee hearing was focused on how foreign countries and adversaries might be trying to steal or negatively influence biomedical research in the US, the only country mentioned by the senators and expert witnesses was China.

Committee chair Patty Murray (D-WA) made clear in her opening remarks that the US cannot “let the few instances of bad actors” overshadow the hard work of the many immigrant researchers in the US, many of which have won Nobel prizes for their work. But she also said, “There is more the NIH can be doing here.”