| | | |   | Good morning, all. Damian here with the latest CEO drama, a deal that should hearten biotech investors, and a pressing question for flu season. | | | Black smoke from the Teva conclave Teva, the long-in-decline pharmaceutical giant with a board famously described as a “nuthouse,” has chosen a new CEO.
Richard Francis, currently a partner at the investment firm Syncona, will take control of the Israeli firm starting Jan. 1, Teva said yesterday. His résumé includes a five-year stint running Sandoz, the generics division of Novartis, and more than a decade at Biogen. Kare Schultz, the last executive brought in to restore Teva to its former glory, declined to renew his contract earlier this month and will step down early to make way for Francis.
Teva has lost more than 80% of its value since 2015, as declining revenues, pricing pressure, and some questionable strategic decisions have cut into what was once a pillar of the global pharmaceutical industry. In a statement, Francis said he intends to build on “Teva’s strong fundamentals and to write the next exciting chapter for Teva, focusing on building a solid pathway to deliver long-term growth.” | Merck keeps biotech’s hope alive Merck, having seemingly walked away from a rumored $40 billion merger, is spending an order of magnitude less on a company called Imago BioSciences in a deal that could hearten biotech investors in a down year.
Merck said yesterday that it will pay about $1.4 billion in cash for Imago, developer of treatments for bone marrow diseases. That’s a more than 100% premium to the company’s previous closing price. Imago, founded in 2012, went public last summer at $16 a share and has gyrated in step with the broader biotech market.
The deal is small in major pharma terms, and it won’t have the kind of sector-wide effects that Merck’s long-rumored Seagen acquisition would have. But it is a reminder that despite declining stock prices across biotech, multibillion-dollar companies still see value out there.
Read more. | How can sensitive molecular tools detect solid tumors sooner and inform precision treatments? Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) can yield an incredible wealth of information about cancer progression, response to treatment, and likelihood of recurrence, but key biomarkers are often lowly abundant. Find out how ultra-sensitive molecular methods are already driving advancements in therapy monitoring and minimal residual disease (MRD) testing for solid tumors, and discover use cases for technology platforms like next generation sequencing. Find out. | Where's my at-home flu test? Over the past two years, Americans have grown accustomed to — and often quite adept at — testing themselves for Covid-19. But as the winter portends a dangerous combination of infectious diseases, you might wonder: Why can’t I get an at-home test for the flu?
The short answer, STAT’s Brittany Trang reports, involves regulatory reticence, cultural hangups, and some legitimate scientific concerns. The FDA has generally been slow to approve at-home tests for infectious agents, in part over concerns that anyone would heed them.
Covid-19 has changed that perception, but it hasn’t addressed some concerns specific to influenza. At-home tests are less accurate than those done by a health care worker, and the ever-changing flu virus could make them even more unreliable.
Read more. | Kicking the tires on the latest Northwest Bio dustup Northwest Biotherapeutics, which has spent more than a decade developing a treatment for brain cancer, spent the weekend touting what appear to be encouraging study results. But a closer look at the data raises red flags.
As STAT’s Adam Feuerstein reports, Northwest Bio and its scientific collaborators claimed the drug reduced the risk of death by 20%. But that survival benefit was derived from an untrustworthy, post-hoc analysis implemented and conducted after the study had already been completed, leading one outside neurosurgeon to declare the results “uninterpretable” and another to dismiss the data as “unpersuasive.”
Read more. | More reads - ‘Digital health is late to the party’: Can telehealth help hospitals mitigate their carbon footprints? STAT
- Merck picks Goldman Sachs to launch pigments sale in 2023, Reuters
- Biggest drug companies halted Twitter ad buys after Lilly insulin spoof, Endpoints
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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