Boris John­son may have pledged to con­tin­ue build­ing on Britain’s “enor­mous strengths” in life sci­ence as he blazes a path to­ward Brex­it, but one of the coun­try’s top fun­ders of bio­med­ical re­search is de­mand­ing more.

In a let­ter to the UK’s new Prime Min­is­ter, Well­come Trust warned that “the fi­nal months of 2019 could be a tip­ping point for UK sci­ence” and leav­ing the EU with­out a deal is a threat to the thriv­ing sec­tor. La­dy Eliza Man­ning­ham-Buller, who chairs the char­i­ty, urged John­son to make a sig­nif­i­cant state­ment on sci­ence to lay out his vi­sion in the face of glob­al health emer­gen­cies and the loom­ing loss of ac­cess to col­lab­o­ra­tion with Eu­ro­pean peers.

But David Grainger of Medicxi, a Lon­don-based VC firm known for its as­set-cen­tric plays around Eu­rope, dis­missed Well­come Trust’s let­ter as “more scare­mon­ger­ing” and as­sert­ed “UK as a place to do sci­ence will be un­af­fect­ed” by Brex­it.

I am re­spon­si­ble for more than 20 UK biotech com­pa­nies and we en­vis­age no im­pact in our busi­ness­es from a #NoDeal #brex­it – so I have skin in mak­ing such state­ment (ar­guably more than @well­cometrust does)

— David Grainger (@sci­ences­can­ner) Ju­ly 28, 2019

One of John­son’s key promis­es to the par­ty mem­bers who elect­ed him was that he will ex­e­cute the UK’s de­par­ture from the EU by Oc­to­ber 31, come what may.

The con­cerns are hard­ly new. While John­son was still vy­ing for the lead­er­ship role against fel­low Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty MP Je­re­my Hunt, re­searcher or­ga­ni­za­tions in­clud­ing Can­cer Re­search UK have sound­ed sim­i­lar alarms. The un­cer­tain­ty around the fu­ture re­la­tion­ship be­tween the UK and oth­er coun­tries in Eu­rope has al­ready jeop­ar­dized re­searchers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in con­ti­nen­tal re­search pacts, they said.

Man­ning­ham-Buller echoes that “some dam­age has al­ready been done, with loss of re­searchers, and in­flu­ence.” And like Pamela Kearns of CRUK, she raised con­cerns about se­cur­ing mem­ber­ship in Hori­zon Eu­rope, a €100 bil­lion (£89.9 bil­lion) fund­ing pro­gram that fea­tures can­cer as one of its key mis­sions.

“While sci­ence pro­motes glob­al col­lab­o­ra­tion, the bar­ri­ers to suc­cess need to be min­i­mized, in­clud­ing with Eu­rope where our clos­est and most ex­ten­sive sci­ence re­la­tion­ships are,” the let­ter read. “That means ne­go­ti­at­ing as­so­ci­at­ed coun­try sta­tus in the EU’s ‘Hori­zon Eu­rope’ re­search pro­gramme, even if we in­tend to cre­ate our own sys­tems in the years ahead.”

It is up to John­son’s gov­ern­ment to seize the op­por­tu­ni­ty and “spend the sort of mon­ey our com­peti­tors are do­ing” — such as Ger­many — Man­ning­ham-Buller told the BBC.

“The key to this will be to en­sure that in­creased pub­lic in­vest­ment leads to an even greater pri­vate sec­tor con­tri­bu­tion to­wards the de­vel­op­ment and use of new tech­nolo­gies, in­clud­ing through pa­tient cap­i­tal,” she wrote in her let­ter.

When Regeneron scored an early approval for lipid lowering antibody Evkeeza back in February, the drugmaker cracked open a new pathway to lower abnormally high cholesterol levels. Now, Regeneron is chasing high triglycerides as well with some promising mid-stage data — but will genetic restrictions limit the drug’s use?

Regeneron’s Evkeeza (evinacumab) cut median triglyceride levels by more than 800 mg/dL (57%) in patients with a rare disorder causing abnormally high triglyceride levels compared with an overall increase of 50 mg/dL (1.8%) in participants on placebo, according to Phase II data presented Sunday at the virtual American College of Cardiology meeting.

AstraZeneca hasn’t seen many setbacks in recent months for SGLT2 inhibitor Farxiga, which broke ground in heart failure and kidney disease regardless of diabetes diagnosis. But the British drugmaker had to admit defeat in taking Farxiga into Covid-19, but follow-up results add a bit of a silver lining to that trial’s safety data.

Of hospitalized Covid-19 patients dosed with AstraZeneca’s Farxiga, 11.2% experienced an organ failure or died after 30 days of therapy compared with 13.8% of those given placebo, according to follow-up data from the DARE-19 study revealed Sunday at the virtual American College of Cardiology meeting.

If Novartis learned one thing from its interaction with the FDA over its latest heart failure approval for Entresto, it was that missing a primary endpoint may not be the nail in the coffin. Now, Entresto has missed again on a late-stage study in high-risk heart patients, and it’s already sowing the seeds for a path forward regardless.

Novartis’ Entresto couldn’t best standard-of-care ramipril in staving off a composite of deaths and heart failure events in patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction and/or pulmonary congestion who have had a prior heart attack, according to topline data from the Phase III PARADISE-MI study revealed Saturday at the virtual American College of Cardiology meeting.

Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb’s non-warfarin blood thinner Eliquis has raced out to become the most prescribed drug of its class on the market — even overtaking warfarin’s long-time lead. But in tricky-to-treat patients after a valve replacement, an investigator-sponsored study couldn’t turn up benefit and raised a troubling safety signal.

Eliquis failed to show benefit over standard of care in preventing serious clinical outcomes after a transaortic valve replacement (TAVR) and was linked to an “unexplained signal” in a subset of populations with a higher rate of non-CV deaths who did not need blood thinners apart from the surgery, according to data presented Saturday at the virtual American College of Cardiology meeting.

When Bristol Myers Squibb signed off on its $13 billion acquisition of MyoKardia back in October, it was making a big bet that lead drug mavacamten could prove a game changer in cardiac myopathy. Now, with the drug up for FDA review, Bristol Myers is backing up its case with new quality of life data.

Patients dosed with myosin inhibitor mavacamten posted a clinically significant increase in scores on the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire, a catch-all summary of symptoms and quality of life markers, over placebo at 30 weeks, according to data from the Phase III EXPLORER-HCM study presented Saturday at the virtual American College of Cardiology meeting.