Between 2017 and 2019, Medicare spent more than $220 million on cancer drugs for which the indications were either voluntarily pulled by their applicants or FDA’s oncology adcomm had recommended their withdrawal.

That kind of massive spending on cancer drugs lacking overall survival benefit is wasteful and risks harming people’s health, a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday said. The researchers from Harvard and the London School of Economics called on the FDA to move faster in both requiring timely postmarketing trials and accelerating the speed in pulling these dangling approvals when the confirmatory studies fail.

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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.

While this was not a week for earth-shattering news, there were certainly a lot of interesting tidbits. If you found this recap helpful, please recommend it to your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you on the other side of the long weekend.

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As the close runner-up to Amgen’s Lumakras in the KRAS race, any data cut from Mirati’s adagrasib continues to draw scrutiny from analysts. And the latest batch of numbers from ASCO is a decidedly mixed bag.

While a quick comparison suggests that adagrasib spurred slightly more responses and led to a longer overall survival than Lumakras among a group of non-small cell lung cancer patients, its duration of response appears shorter and the safety profile continues to spark concern.

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When Ann saw the first TV commercials for HIV medicine Dovato, she didn’t see herself represented. So the 74-year-old retired school administrator who’s been living with HIV since 1998, reached out to GSK’s ViiV Healthcare and asked why not?

Now Ann is one of three people starring in ViiV’s latest Dovato campaign called “Detect This.” The next-step evolution in the branded campaign plays on the word “detect” — often used in describing HIV status under control as undetectable — but in this case, uses the word as a directive for people to understand they can use fewer medicines.

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The Senate is joining its House counterparts and advancing accelerated approval pathway reforms to the FDA user fee legislation that must be signed by President Joe Biden before the end of September or else the FDA will have to start laying off its staff.

While Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) warned yesterday that the user fee deals could be delayed by the infant formula crisis, the newly introduced bill on Friday shows how the Senate is aligning with its House counterparts on similar accelerated approval reforms.

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Catalyst Biosciences was down to five employees in March, and the biotech needed to do something after two rounds of layoffs, a nixed collaboration and a culling of its hemophilia program.

In came Vertex, with $60 million to buy up the South San Francisco biotech’s preclinical complement drugs, which target the system that bridges the body’s innate and adaptive immune response and a class most known for Ultomiris and Soliris. The deal includes CB 2782-PEG, the dry AMD drug that Biogen no longer wanted in March.

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