| | | |   | Good morning, everyone. Damian here with an update on the Merck-Seagen saga, a look at the next race in mRNA, and the crash of an ascendant biotech. | | | It’s like Merck never happened  Seagen, subject of summer-long speculation it would be acquired by Merck for more than $40 billion, is now worth less than when those rumors began.
The Seattle biotech closed at about $144 per share yesterday, slipping below its price on June 17, when the Wall Street Journal first reported on Merck’s interest in buying it. Merck floated an offer of about $200 a share, the Journal reported over the summer, and Seagen has since traded toward and away from that number in keeping with investors’ expectations, at its height reaching into the $180s.
Yesterday’s offending incident appeared to be sparked by interim CEO Roger Dansey, who, speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, responded to an innocuous question with an innocuous statement about how Seagen might eventually buy a smaller firm of its own, a signal to some investors that Merck wasn’t swooping in any time soon. | The next mRNA race is in influenza Moderna and partners Pfizer and BioNTech are aiming to translate their enviably profitable pandemics into a regular business in influenza, each taking a different approach to what could be a multibillion-dollar annual market.
Yesterday, Pfizer said it had begun a 25,000-patient Phase 3 study to test how well its BioNTech-partnered vaccine can protect people against four strains of the flu compared to Sanofi’s market-leading Fluzone. According to a listing on ClinicalTrials.gov, the study will conclude next summer.
Meanwhile, Moderna recently completed enrollment in a 6,000-volunteer Phase 3 study to determine how well its quadrivalent vaccine boosts antibody titers, angling to win an accelerated approval on immunogenicity data alone. The company has said it could start a head-to-head efficacy study like Pfizer’s “as early as” the coming flu season. | STEM students are helping Michigan residents turn their taps on without fear The Flint Community Lab is training the next generation of scientists to collect and test water samples, restoring trust in local water sources and returning hope to the community of Flint, Michigan. Read more. | What does $2 billion buy in biomanufacturing? The White House is putting money behind President Biden’s executive order to bolster domestic biotech manufacturing, committing more than $2 billion in a five-year effort.
As STAT’s Allison DeAngelis reports, the initiative calls on the Department of Defense to invest $1 billion to help public- and private-sector organizations expand their manufacturing capacity and allocates another $40 million to expand production of antibiotics and prepare for future pandemics.
The plan, reportedly drafted in response to China’s growing influence in global biotech manufacturing, pales in comparison to Biden’s recent executive order related to semiconductor production, which allocated more than $54 billion.
Read more. | An ascendant biotech crashes Altimmune, among the year’s best-performing biotech stocks, fell as much as 45% yesterday after its investigational treatment for obesity disappointed in a clinical trial.
The drug, pemvidutide, met its primary goal of reducing liver fat content in a study enrolling 94 patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and it had a statistically significant effect on weight loss. The problem came in the details. Pemvidutide’s effect on weight was weaker than the demonstrated benefits of approved treatments from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. Further complicating the data, the highest tested dose of Altimmune’s drug performed worse than a lower dose.
Altimmune’s share price had risen more than four-fold since June on investor optimism that the small company could compete in the growing market for metabolic medicines. The company is awaiting data from pemvidutide studies in obesity and Type 1 diabetes. | More reads - Moderna open to supplying COVID vaccines to China, CEO says, Reuters
- EU stonewalls over von der Leyen’s role in multibillion-euro Pfizer vaccine deal, Politico
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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