| | | |   | Good morning! Damian here with the news that STAT Madness, our annual bracket-style competition to choose the prior year’s most exciting biomedical discovery, starts on Monday. Check out the contenders. | | | The latest SPAC unraveling has an ominous undertone Amicus Therapeutics has canceled plans to spin out its gene therapy division through a merger with a blank-check firm, the company said yesterday, news that both deepens concerns about the SPAC market and underlines a biotech-specific problem.
As STAT’s Adam Feuerstein reports, the $600 million deal, announced five months ago, would have created a new publicly traded gene therapy company called Caritas Therapeutics. Instead, Amicus and its SPAC partner terminated the merger, citing “unfavorable market conditions” for new biotech financings, as well as an “increasingly challenging environment for stand-alone gene therapy companies.”
Over the past year, gene therapy companies including Bluebird Bio, AvroBio, uniQure, and Homology Medicines have fallen even more sharply than the overall biotech market amid concerns about safety, clinical trial setbacks, botched commercial launches, and increased regulatory scrutiny.
Read more. | How many Covid-19 vaccines does the world really need? What will it take to address inequality in American health care? And should people be nicer to Moderna?
We cover all that and more this week on “The Readout LOUD,” STAT’s biotech podcast. First, we discuss the latest news in Covid-19 vaccines, including data from Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, the future of Novavax, and what comes next for Moderna. Then, STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling joins us to talk about a groundbreaking investigation into racial and ethnic disparities in American medicine — and why almost nothing has changed in the 20 years since it was published.
Listen here. | Patients want change; providers agree — we need to disrupt the status quo Inequities within the U.S. healthcare system are worsening for medically disenfranchised patients. Genentech believes sustainable solutions require a deeper understanding of their experiences. We surveyed underserved patients and their healthcare providers to learn more about their perceptions of and experiences with the healthcare system. See what they had to say here. | The next big CRISPR milestone is coming Monday Last year, Intellia Therapeutics marked a major milestone in CRISPR with news that the first six patients in a landmark study safely had the DNA inside their liver cells edited. On Monday, Intellia will reveal a full readout from the study clinical trial, which includes data from four cohorts.
Intellia’s therapy, called NTLA-2001, is designed to cripple the TTR gene, which makes the protein transthyretin. Mutations to this gene lead the liver to produce malformed, unstable versions of the protein, which accumulate into toxic plaques and cause a progressive, fatal disease called transthyretin amyloidosis. Monday’s data should answer a number of lingering questions, including how big a reduction in TTR is achievable, how consistent NTLA-2001’s effects are across patient groups, and how long the benefits effects.
To John Leonard, Intellia’s CEO, the race to turn CRISPR into a medicine harkens back to the 1990s, when scientists at Merck, Roche, and Abbott Laboratories raced to develop new medicines for HIV. “I feel sort of the same energy now, all these years later,” Leonard, who led Abbott’s work on its first-generation AIDS drug, said at a STAT virtual event yesterday. “It’s the nature of the adventure. Thinking about 1979, 1980, inconceivable stuff back then is mundane today.”
Read more. | Moderna’s buying Moderna After months of armchair chief financial officers advising Moderna to spend its Covid-19 billions on big acquisitions or a dividend for shareholders, the company has instead taken the well-trodden pharmaceutical road of stock buybacks.
During its earnings presentation yesterday, Moderna said it would spend $3 billion buying its own shares over the coming months, news that sent its share price up about 15%. That follows the roughly $1 billion Moderna has already spent on shares of Moderna.
But is that the best use of the company’s capital? As SVB Leerink analyst Mani Foroohar wrote in a note to clients, running the numbers on Moderna’s last repurchase program, the company bought shares at a price about 80% above where it’s currently trading. Buying more might help stabilize the stock price in the short term, but if Moderna stays volatile in the years to come, the company might wish it had spent that cash on something more accretive. | More reads - Judge bars Shkreli from running another public company, fines him $1.4 million. STAT+
- Canada first to approve Medicago's plant-based Covid-19 vaccine. National Post
- Improving diversity in Alzheimer’s research can help update the ‘gold standard’ for all medical research. STAT
- Russian invasion of Ukraine could affect more than 200 clinical trials. FierceBiotech
| Thanks for reading! Until next week,  | | | |
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