The top 100 biopharma VCs, Bob Bradway places $2B bet in cancer, gene editing pioneer’s new big idea, and more

March 6, 2021 07:36 AM EST

The top 100 biopharma VCs, Bob Bradway places $2B bet in cancer, gene editing pioneer's new big idea, and more

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

Before diving in, we had some news to share: Endpoints is launching a premium weekly report focusing on all things regulatory. Coverage will be led by our new senior editor, Zachary Brennan, who joins us from POLITICO. Arsalan Arif has more details in his Publisher’s Note.

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At the Inflection Point for the Next Generation of Cancer Immunotherapy

Willem Overwijk, Ph.D.

Vice President, Oncology Research, Nektar Therapeutics

While oncology researchers have long pursued the potential of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, it was unclear whether these therapies would ever reach patients due to the complexity of manufacturing and costs of development. Fortunately, the recent successful development and regulatory approval of chimeric antigen receptor-engineered T (CAR-T) cells have demonstrated the significant benefit of these therapies to patients.

Tillman Gerngross (Adagio)

November 29, 2021 07:04 AM ESTUpdated 02:20 PM

Tillman Gerngross on Omicron: 'It is a grim situation...we’re going to see a significant drop in vaccine efficacy'

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Tillman Gerngross, the rarely shy Dartmouth professor, biotech entrepreneur and antibody expert, has been warning for over a year that the virus behind Covid-19 would likely continue to mutate, potentially in ways that avoid immunity from infection and the best defenses scientists developed. He spun out a company, Adagio, to build a universal antibody, one that could snuff out any potential mutation.

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Incorporating External Data into Clinical Trials: Comparing Digital Twins to External Control Arms

Unlearn.AI

Most drug development professionals are familiar with the nerve-racking wait for the read-out of a large trial. If it’s negative, is the investigational therapy ineffective? Or could the failure result from an unforeseen flaw in the design or execution of the protocol, rather than a lack of efficacy? The team could spend weeks analyzing data, but a definitive answer may be elusive due to insufficient power for such analyses in the already completed trial. These problems are only made worse if the trial had lower enrollment, or higher dropout than expected due to an unanticipated event like COVID-19. And if a trial is negative, the next one is likely to be larger and more costly — if it happens at all.

ENDPOINTS CAREERS

Lead Manager / Associate Director of Statistical Genetics

Deep Genomics

Boston, MA, USA

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November 27, 2021 06:00 AM EST

Weekly

Thanksgiving edition: Top 15 Endpoints stories of 2021; Can you name that vaccine?; Merck's Covid antiviral disappoints; FDA nominee's industry ties; and more

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

Happy Thanksgiving to all those who are celebrating it — although, if we are being honest, this week’s abbreviated edition is really for those who are not. Wherever you’re tuning in from, we appreciate your support, hope you find this recap helpful and we wish you a wonderful weekend.

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November 29, 2021 10:06 AM ESTUpdated 01:19 PM

FDA+

Coronavirus

Like the flu vaccine every year, the FDA could move quickly on a variant-targeted Covid vaccine

Zachary Brennan

Senior Editor

In the same way that the FDA signs off on flu vaccines every year without requiring large clinical trials to measure their efficacy, the FDA may employ a similar strategy in authorizing variant-focused versions of the mRNA vaccines.

As the world braces for more data on the latest variant Omicron, which may reduce vaccine efficacy, top vaccine developers like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have promised they can pull together a new vaccine targeted against a specific Covid variant in about 100 days. Since Omicron emerged last week, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and J&J have all said they’ve begun work on Omicron-specific vaccines, if needed.

November 26, 2021 08:35 AM ESTUpdated 12:53 PM

Bioregnum

Cell/Gene Tx

What were Endpoints readers tuning into this year? Here’s a look at our 15 most popular reports of the year (so far)

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

At the beginning of this year, I laid out a basic objective for Endpoints News as we headed to our 5th anniversary. We’ve long been doing a fine job covering the breaking news in R&D — if I do say so myself — but we needed to expand our horizons on industry coverage, increase the staff and go much, much deeper when the stories demanded it.

In a phrase: broader and deeper.

It’s safe to say, based on our daily web traffic, that you all seemed to like this idea. We’ve doubled the staff — thanks to a growing group of paid subscribers — ramped up the daily report and now publish a regular slate of in-depth articles. And traffic — those clicks you always read about — have gone up in volume too. Monthly sessions are up 43%, to close to 1.5 million. Unique readers are up 63%, to 874,480 in October, after setting a record of close to a million the month before. Page views are running at 3 million-plus a month. And the overall number of subscribers has surged to 124,000.

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Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

November 26, 2021 07:06 AM ESTUpdated 05:32 PM

Coronavirus

Omicron: Researchers scramble as new coronavirus mutation takes flight around the globe — Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna vow swift response

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

As Americans were waking up for their Black Friday rituals, they were greeted with the news that a new mutation of the Covid-19 virus has appeared and been sequenced — after it caught an international flight to Hong Kong. And two of the leading Covid-19 vaccine developers promised delivery of a new vaccine “within 100 days” if necessary while a third spelled out its 3-prong strategy hours later.

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ENDPOINTS CAREERS

Executive Director - Data Analysis - Science & Technology

Alexandria Real Estate Equities

Pasadena, CA

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November 29, 2021 11:11 AM EST

News Briefing

Never too late: Forbion pitches $100M SPAC; Kronos Bio releases early interim data on CDK9 inhibitor

Paul Schloesser

Associate Editor

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Dutch VC Forbion is hopping on the ever-lengthening SPAC train.

To be led by Jasper Bos, who joined Forbion Growth as a general partner back in May just after the fund closed at $428 million, Forbion European Acquisition will target late-stage opportunities in the life sciences industry in Europe to merge with and bring onto Nasdaq.

Cyril Lesser, senior controller at Forbion, will be the CFO while Bos serves as CEO.

Jeff Albers, Blueprint Medicines CEO

November 29, 2021 10:59 AM ESTUpdated 02:00 PM

Deals

Looking past Big Pharma rivals, Blueprint buys a preclinical biotech for $250M+

Nicole DeFeudis

Editor

J&J’s Rybrevant scored the first approval back in May for a small group of lung cancer patients with a rare EGFR mutation. Despite a swarm of other biopharma companies angling for a piece of that market, Blueprint Medicines is betting nearly $500 million on a candidate it thinks will stand out.

Blueprint is putting down $250 million in cash and another $215 million in biobucks for Lengo Therapeutics and its preclinical non-small cell lung cancer program LNG-451. Though it hasn’t been tested in humans, Blueprint says the candidate was “highly brain-penetrant” in preclinical trials, and has the potential to inhibit all common EGFR exon 20 insertion variants — which are found in just 2% to 3% of NSCLC patients.

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