Years af­ter Keytru­da, pa­tients with pre­vi­ous­ly un­treat­ed non-small cell lung can­cer (NSCLC) fi­nal­ly have a new check­point in­hibitor monother­a­py op­tion: Roche’s Tecen­triq.

Mer­ck’s star drug cap­tured this ripe in­di­ca­tion in 2016, win­ning the bat­tle for check­point in­hibitor su­prema­cy years ago. On Mon­day, the FDA ap­proved Roche’s Tecen­triq on its own for new­ly di­ag­nosed, metasta­t­ic pa­tients with­out EGFR or ALK mu­ta­tions whose tu­mors car­ry lev­els of the bio­mark­er PD-L1 reg­is­ter­ing at 50% or greater.

The reg­u­la­to­ry de­ci­sion was based on the re­sults of the 572-pa­tient tri­al, called IM­pow­er110, which test­ed Tecen­triq monother­a­py against chemother­a­py. (Of course, chemother­a­py is no longer the stan­dard-of-care as it was when Roche kicked off the study — it has been dis­placed by Keytru­da, ei­ther alone or in tan­dem with chemother­a­py).

Da­ta showed Tecen­triq helped pa­tients live longer by an ad­di­tion­al 7.1 months com­pared with chemother­a­py: Me­di­an over­all sur­vival was 20.2 months for pa­tients in the Tecen­triq arm com­pared with 13.1 months in the chemother­a­py arm.

“By virtue of be­ing late to mar­ket, Tecen­triq monother­a­py (IM­POW­ER110) has lit­tle chance of gain­ing sig­nif­i­cant share in 1L NSCLC de­spite post­ing OS sim­i­lar to Keytru­da in PD-L1 high pa­tients,” Cowen an­a­lyst Steve Scala wrote in a note ear­li­er this month. “How­ev­er, that com­pa­ra­ble OS ben­e­fit may give con­fi­dence that any ad­di­tion­al ef­fi­ca­cy pro­vid­ed by (an­ti-TIG­IT drug) tiragolum­ab in Phase II will trans­late to su­pe­ri­or per­for­mance of the com­bi­na­tion in Phase III.”

Lung can­cer is the lead­ing cause of can­cer death glob­al­ly, ac­cord­ing to the WHO. The two main types of lung can­cer are non-small cell and small cell, and NSCLC ac­counts for about 85% of all cas­es. The Swiss drug­mak­er is carv­ing it­self a big­ger piece of the lu­cra­tive im­muno-on­col­o­gy mar­ket, which is large­ly mo­nop­o­lized by Mer­ck’s Keytru­da, and to a less­er ex­tent Bris­tol My­ers Squibb’s Op­di­vo.

This is Tecen­triq’s fifth lung can­cer ap­proval. The com­bi­na­tion of Tecen­triq and Avastin is al­ready ap­proved for first-line use in NC­SLC pa­tients, of­fer­ing an op­tion for pa­tients with liv­er metas­tases — and it was the first check­point in­hibitor to se­cure ap­proval in pa­tients with small-cell lung can­cer (SCLC).

Mean­while, da­ta from a Phase III study un­veiled at AS­CO re­cent­ly showed Bris­tol My­ers’ com­bi­na­tion of Op­di­vo and Yer­voy cut the risk of death by 31% com­pared to chemo alone in NSCLC pa­tients.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.