Take­da has stum­bled again in its quest to build up the block­buster po­ten­tial of its mul­ti­ple myelo­ma drug Nin­laro. The phar­ma gi­ant says the drug com­bined with dex­am­etha­sone failed to pro­vide sig­nif­i­cant help for pa­tients with rare cas­es of sys­temic light-chain amy­loi­do­sis, so now they’re scrap­ping the en­tire Phase III pro­gram.

Philip Row­lands LinkedIn

The drug failed on the first pri­ma­ry end­point on hema­to­log­i­cal re­spons­es, and re­searchers are throw­ing in the tow­el on or­gan de­te­ri­o­ra­tion and death, the sec­ond pri­ma­ry end­point, with lit­tle ex­pec­ta­tion of suc­cess. The drug com­bo with dex was com­pared against a physi­cian’s choice se­lec­tion of dex­am­etha­sone plus ei­ther mel­pha­lan, cy­clophos­phamide, thalido­mide, or lenalido­mide; or dex­am­etha­sone alone.

We won’t have the num­bers un­til a lat­er sci­en­tif­ic con­fer­ence, but Take­da on­col­o­gy chief Phil Row­lands said the tri­al was “one of the largest” mount­ed in this field. Pa­tients suf­fer­ing from amy­loi­do­sis ex­pe­ri­ence an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of amy­loid in or­gans, which can trig­ger even­tu­al or­gan fail­ure. 

Take­da has had high hopes for Nin­laro since its ap­proval in 2015. But it al­so faces sig­nif­i­cant com­pe­ti­tion with a grow­ing va­ri­ety of drugs in the same mar­ket.

This lat­est set­back on Nin­laro comes fast on the heels of an­oth­er stum­ble ear­li­er in the year, when the com­pa­ny said that it was with­draw­ing their ap­pli­ca­tion to sell the drug as a main­te­nance ther­a­py for myelo­ma pa­tients af­ter stem cell trans­plants. Take­da had pur­sued that  in­di­ca­tion with pos­i­tive pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival stats, but the agency is hold­ing out for over­all sur­vival da­ta be­fore they con­sid­er a green light.

So­cial im­age: Take­da

As a potentially powerful flu season looms, so does a big test for Roche and its new flu drug, Xofluza. The Swiss giant just got a small boost in advance of that test as the FDA expanded Xofluza’s indication to include patients at high risk of developing flu-related complications.

Xofluza (baloxavir marboxil) was approved last October in the US, the first landmark flu drug approval in 20 years and a much-needed green light for a company that had watched its leading flu drug Tamiflu get eaten alive by generics. Like its predecessor, the pill offered a reduction in flu symptoms but not a cure.

The first-ever Ebola vaccine is on the precipice of approval after the European Medicine’s Agency (EMA) backed the Merck product in this week’s roster of recommendations.

The drugmaker $MRK began developing the vaccine, christened Ervebo, during the West African outbreak that occurred between 2014 and 2016, killing more than 11,000.

The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has shown case fatality rates of approximately 67%, the agency estimated. Earlier this year, the WHO declared the outbreak — which so far has infected more than 3,000 people — a public health emergency of international concern.

Medical animation has in recent years become an increasingly important tool for conveying niche information to a varied audience, particularly to those audiences without expertise in the specialist area. Science programmes today, for example, have moved from the piece-to-camera of the university professor explaining how a complex disease mechanism works, to actually showing the viewer first-hand what it might look like to shrink ourselves down to the size of an ant’s foot, and travel inside the human body to witness these processes in action. Effectively communicating a complex disease pathophysiology, or the novel mechanism of action of a new drug, can be complex. This is especially difficult when the audience domain knowledge is limited or non-existent. Medical animation can help with this communication challenge in several ways.
Improved accessibility to visualisation
Visualisation is a core component of our ability to understand a concept. Ask 10 people to visualise an apple, and each will come up with a slightly different image, some apples smaller than others, some more round, some with bites taken. Acceptable, you say, we can move on to the next part of the story. Now ask 10 people to visualise how HIV’s capsid protein gets arranged into the hexamers and pentamers that form the viral capsid that holds HIV’s genetic material. This request may pose a challenge even to someone with some virology knowledge, and it is that inability to effectively visualise what is going on that holds us back from fully understanding the rest of the story. So how does medical animation help us to overcome this visualisation challenge?