Ex-J&J exec dives back into biotech

Mathai Mammen, who until recently led research at Johnson & Johnson, will become the CEO of a privately held biotech company working to find treatments for diseases deemed undruggable.

Mammen, previously a candidate for the top job at Biogen, will take over as chairman, president, and CEO of FogPharma, a Cambridge, Mass., company that spun out of the lab of Harvard University biologist Greg Verdine in 2015. The allure, Mammen said, was Fog's proprietary approach to discovering medicines for biological targets that have long evaded pharmaceutical research — and the potential to develop, manufacture, and market them without selling out to a larger drugmaker.

"There are very few technology platforms that are legitimately broad and capable of producing important medicines," Mammen said in an interview with STAT. "I think Fog has all the markings of being one of those rare few that one can make into a very substantial company in the future."

R&D

J&J drops out of the RSV race

Johnson & Johnson is ending development of its vaccine for RSV and discontinuing a roughly 27,000-person study, setting aside a once-promising medicine that trailed competing vaccines from Pfizer, GSK, and Moderna.

J&J's decision was part of an effort to "focus on medicines with the greatest potential benefit to patients," the company said yesterday. Its RSV vaccine, based on the same technology the company used against Covid-19, led to positive results in a mid-stage study disclosed in 2021.

Meanwhile, Pfizer and GSK are expected to win FDA approval for rival RSV vaccines in the coming months. Moderna's RSV vaccine could reach the market next year, leaving the three companies to compete in what analysts expect to be a roughly $10 billion global market.

Markets

Wall Street loves a cancelation

Shares of BridgeBio rose nearly 20% yesterday after the company canceled an appearance at an investor conference, inviting Wall Street to indulge in a time-honored excuse for buyout speculation.

The news is that BridgeBio, once slated to present at next week's Guggenheim Securities event, and now it is not going to do that. The background is that last week, Bloomberg reported some number of major pharma companies were "studying a potential acquisition" of BridgeBio, adding that there's no certainty anything might come of that. In combination, those two things were enough to send the company's share price to its highest valuation since late 2021.

This sort of thing happens quite often in biotech, where a seemingly innocuous scheduling change seeds market speculation that, more often than not, proves to be pointless in the end. It's also worth remembering back to 2016, when Alexion Pharmaceuticals canceled an appearance at an investor conference with the excuse that "something came up." The market read that as the prelude to a buyout, and Alexion rose 12%. Later we learned that what "came up" was the dawn of an internal investigation that would see a complete managerial overhaul at Alexion, whose value promptly tanked.

Research

How microbial syringes can get drugs into patients' cells

Thanks to untold years of evolution, bacteria have devised a way to inject proteins into the cells of their prey. And thanks to the labors of modern biochemists, that microbial machinery could be repurposed to get therapeutic proteins into previously unreachable cells.

As STAT's Jason Mast reports, a new paper from the lab of MIT biochemist Feng Zhang shows how bacterially derived microsyringes could be used to pierce the cellular membrane and inject a protein payload.

The discovery, while early, could present a new, more precise way to deliver treatments into patients' bodies. Current technologies, including lipid nanoparticles and benign viruses, have proved successful in some applications but have major limitations.