Closer Look
A renowned drug hunter returns to resurrect a biotech
Mike Reddy for STAT
"Turnaround" seems too mild a term to describe what Belgian biotech Galapagos needs. As Emily Field, an equities analyst at Barclays, puts it, "Basically the company is being valued as though they are lighting that cash on fire." Enter Paul Stoffels, renowned for his career hunting promising drugs and acquiring them for J&J. He's emerging from retirement to run Galapagos, a company he co-founded in the 1990s.
Galapagos spent its first 20 years inventing drugs, but now it's borrowing from Project Playbook, a bull's-eye-inspired guide that Stoffels created at J&J. Its first deals involve two companies working on CAR-T treatments for cancer. "Putting all your money on one or two big acquisitions is very risky in our position," Stoffels told STAT's Damian Garde. The strategy is not to "bet the ranch" on the center of the bull's-eye, he said, but to make strategic wagers out on the margins. Read more.
infectious disease
Giving a single antibiotic dose to household contacts cuts risk of leprosy, study says
Leprosy still infects about 200,000 people a year, mostly in Southeast Asia. It's been treatable for decades, thanks to a multidrug therapy dating to the 1980s, but when someone has the chronic infection, people sharing the same household have the greatest risk of also becoming infected. That's because the bacteria spread through close contact over months. New research has found that a single dose of an antibiotic can dramatically lower that risk.
The trial, conducted in China and reported in NEJM yesterday, showed that rifapentine, used to treat tuberculosis, was more effective than another antibiotic, rifampin, typically given under current WHO guidelines for what's known as post-exposure prophylaxis. "Providing protection in close contacts is a potential game changer in leprosy prevention," David Scollard, the former director of the National Hansen's Disease Program in Baton Rouge, wrote in an editorial published with the NEJM study. STAT's Andrew Joseph has more.
health inequities
Tools miscalibrate risk of type 2 diabetes by race
Algorithms are only as good as the data they are based on, a lesson underscored by a new PLOS study examining tools to predict risk for type 2 diabetes. Researchers studied three: the Prediabetes Risk Test from the National Diabetes Prevention Program, the Framingham Offspring Risk Score, and the ARIC Model to see if they showed racial bias between white and Black people. They followed nearly 10,000 people without diabetes from 1999 to 2010 to see how risk was calibrated across racial groups.
The Framingham score overestimated type 2 diabetes risk for white people and underestimated risk for Black people while the PRT and the ARIC models overestimated risk for both races, but more so for white people. That could mean overdiagnosis and over-treatment for white people, but more dangerous under-recognition and under-treatment for Black people, the authors write, pinning the cause on underrepresentation of people of color in studies used to create the models.
No comments