Em­ma Walm­s­ley GSK

Hal Bar­ron and Em­ma Walm­s­ley’s big Glax­o­SmithK­line piv­ot may ul­ti­mate­ly prove suc­cess­ful, de­liv­er­ing block­busters in can­cer, au­to-im­mune con­di­tions and in­fec­tious dis­ease. But the path to get there is al­ready look­ing rocky.

GSK an­nounced their year-end earn­ings Wednes­day morn­ing, re­veal­ing that they had cut two more pipeline can­di­dates af­ter they failed in ear­ly stage tri­als and dis­ap­point­ing in­vestors with news that prof­its had fall­en and earn­ings per share would de­cline by mid to high sin­gle dig­its.

GSK’s stock $GSK fell 4% Wednes­day, from $37.57 to $35.94.

The low­er prof­it mar­gins re­flect the British phar­ma’s in­creased R&D spend­ing — some­thing an­a­lysts and in­vestors some­times re­ward when it pays off. But Bar­ron has seen a slate of R&D set­backs in just the past few weeks. In Jan­u­ary, they an­nounced that the cen­ter­piece of a $4 bil­lion im­muno-on­col­o­gy part­ner­ship with Mer­ck KGaA failed in a Phase III lung can­cer tri­al. Two days lat­er, they scrapped an ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis study for LAG-3 drug af­ter it failed an in­ter­im re­view.

Mean­while, their high-pro­file Covid-19 part­ner­ship with Sanofi faced a ma­jor set­back that knocked the pair out of the cast of vac­cine fron­trun­ners, while an­oth­er vac­cine biotech, Clover, sloughed off their work with GSK en­tire­ly, opt­ing to use a dif­fer­ent ad­ju­vant.

The Q4 re­vealed the com­pa­ny al­so shelved an OX40 ag­o­nist they had been de­vel­op­ing with Mer­ck for sol­id tu­mors and an OSM-tar­get­ing ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis drug, with­draw­ing it from a Phase II study be­fore any pa­tients were en­rolled. An ef­fort to com­bine the au­toim­mune drug Benlysta with Rit­ux­an for the rare dis­ease Sjö­gren’s syn­drome al­so fell short.

With the ex­cep­tion of the Sanofi and Mer­ck KGaA deals, the set­backs did not come in GSK’s ma­jor pro­grams, and the com­pa­ny saw a smat­ter­ing of suc­cess­es, in­clud­ing the first-ever FDA ap­proval for lu­pus nephri­tis and sim­i­lar nods for a BC­MA-tar­get­ing mul­ti­ple myelo­ma drug and, through its HIV sub­sidiary Vi­iV, the first long-act­ing an­ti­retro­vi­ral ther­a­py. Still, col­lec­tive­ly they amount to a thou­sand cuts for a com­pa­ny that has spent, by one es­ti­mate, $29 bil­lion over just 3 years to for­ti­fy its pipeline with clear po­ten­tial block­busters.

Bar­ron and Walm­s­ley will have a hand­ful of op­por­tu­ni­ties to right the ship in the near fu­ture, be­gin­ning with the an­ti­body they de­vel­oped with Vir, which is due to read out on its first tri­al this quar­ter. The com­pa­ny al­so ex­pects new da­ta on Nu­cala and the launch of a piv­otal study for their RSV vac­cine, a long-sought and po­ten­tial­ly high­ly lu­cra­tive prod­uct.

The com­pa­ny has al­so just made a bet on a new ma­jor Covid-19 vac­cine ef­fort, re­dou­bling on their past sup­port for Cure­Vac with a new in­fu­sion of $180 mil­lion to ramp up man­u­fac­tur­ing and help de­vel­op a new vac­cine against emerg­ing vari­ants.

Zoom can only go so far. And I think at this stage, we’ve all tested the limits of staying in touch — virtually. So I’m particularly happy now that we’ve revved up the travel machine to point myself to London for the first time in several years.

Whatever events we have lined up, we’ve always built in plenty of opportunities for all of us to get together and talk. For London, live, I plan to be right out front, meeting with and chatting with the small crowd of biopharma people we are hosting on October 12 at Silicon Valley Bank’s London headquarters. And there’s a lengthy mixer at the end I’m most looking forward to, with several networking openings between sessions.

Takeda on Tuesday morning made an announcement that almost 3,000 people with the rare disease known as hypoparathyroidism were fearing.

Due to unresolved supply issues and manufacturing woes, Takeda said it will cut its losses and discontinue its hypoparathyroidism drug, known as Natpara (parathyroid hormone), halting all manufacturing of the drug by the end of 2024, but the entire inventory will be available until depleted or expired, a company spokesperson said via email.

When Kaile Zagger took the helm of UC Davis spinout Evolve Biosystems several months ago, the company billed itself as a probiotic maker.

However, she believes the company’s Evivo supplement designed to help infants develop a healthy gut microbiome is “so much more” — and that, she said, calls for a rebrand.

Evolve has, well, evolved into Infinant Health, the company announced on Monday. The new name is a mash-up of the words “infant” and “infinite,” representing the company’s goal of expanding beyond infant care. While its sole product, Evivo, is intended for newborns, Infinant is “quickly developing” an option for kids through the age of two.