July 21, 2023

The need-to-know this morning

A European regulatory panel reviewing a lung cancer drug made by Mirati Therapeutics has recommended against its approval. The company plans to appeal.
The same European regulatory panel recommended the approval of a treatment for chronic cough made by Merck. The drug was rejected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2022.

Chart of the day

Covid-19 is a hard act to follow

Shares of Vir Biotechnology fell by nearly 50% yesterday on news that its preventive treatment for flu, the successor to the company's blockbuster Covid-19 medicine, failed in a pivotal trial.

As STAT's Jason Mast reports, volunteers who got the highest dose of the company's drug, known as VIR-2482, were only 16% less likely than the placebo group to develop symptomatic influenza A infections over a seven-month period, a difference that was not statistically significant.

Vir has lost more than 80% of its value since early 2021, when the company's antibody treatment for Covid-19, partnered with GSK, proved to be one of the few medicines that could stand up to the Omicron variant. The company's attempts to develop medicines for other infectious diseases, including a vaccine for HIV, have not been similarly successful.

Podcast

What can Homer teach us about biotech?

Has Big Science gotten too big? And what's the future of treating Alzheimer's disease?

We cover all that and more this week on "The Readout LOUD," STAT's biotech podcast. Neil Kumar, CEO of BridgeBio, joins us to talk about how his small company came to develop what could be a big drug — and why classical Greek literature remains relevant. We also discuss the latest news in the life sciences, including the abrupt resignation of the celebrity scientist who led Stanford University and the implications of tornado damage at a Pfizer plant.

Listen here.

Financials

Legend Biotech is living up to its name

Back in 2017, the Chinese firm Legend Biotech was a drug industry curiosity, having shown up to the year's biggest oncology conference with what appeared to be peerless data from a CAR-T cancer therapy. Six years later, that same medicine is on pace to becoming a $5 billion product.

Johnson & Johnson, Legend's commercial partner, said yesterday that sales of the company's CAR-T treatment totaled $117 million in the second quarter, a figure that beat Wall Street's expectations by 40%. Based on that number, TD Cowen analyst Yaron Werber concluded that J&J and Legend have already built up enough manufacturing capacity to serve 1,000 patients, something that wasn't expected until the end of 2023.

That suggests the treatment, approved for blood cancer under the brand name Carvykti, will eventually reach $5 billion in annual sales, according to J&J. And it means Legend, which now commands a market value of $13 billion, was onto something way back in 2017.

Washington

Bernie wants to give pharma a prize

But only in exchange for their patents.

Sen. Bernie Sanders' idea is to do away with intellectual property and instead hand out a presumably handsome monetary reward to companies that develop new and needed medicines. Competitors could immediately make versions of their own, but they wouldn't get any prizes for it, thus creating a system that, according to Sanders, would incentivize research without limiting access to life-saving drugs.

It's an idea Sanders has floated more than once over the years, most recently to Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. The news, as STAT's John Wilkerson reports, is that he finally found a way to direct the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study the proposal.

Read more.

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