September 20, 2023

The latest twist in the Apellis saga

An ophthalmological drama that has swung billions of dollars in value got a little more interesting thanks to the latest twist in the competition between Apellis Pharmaceuticals and Astellas.

As STAT's Adam Feuerstein reports, Astellas said this week that its treatment for geographic atrophy, a common cause of vision loss, succeeded in a key long-term study. But that announcement was curiously light on details, casting doubt on whether Astellas' medicine can compete with the one from Apellis.

Meanwhile, Apellis is slowly coming back from a safety scare tied to its geographic atrophy medicine, set in motion by some case reports of serious eye inflammation after administering the drug. That controversy, which became the first chapter in the Astellas-Apellis saga, began when people with undisclosed financial ties to Astellas' drug first raised concerns about Apellis'.

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Real estate

Biotech's downturn is hurting landlords

Back in 2020, when the money was flowing into biotech, the nation's leasers of lab space enjoyed an unprecedented seller's market. Now, with the sector closing in on its third year of decline, the landlords of the life sciences are feeling the pinch.

As STAT's Jonathan Wosen reports, demand for new lab space has fallen by more than a half since the end of 2021, according to the latest report from the commercial real estate services company JLL. Across the eight biggest markets for the life sciences, tenant demand, measured by the total amount of new space companies are looking to lease, dropped from about 25 million square feet at the end of 2021 to roughly 10 million square feet by the second quarter of this year.

"We had really what was a sugar high of 2020 to 2022," said Mark Bruso, research director at JLL and one of the report's authors. "I think what's happening right now is basically a reset."

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Aesthetics

Demand for Botox is aging well

The bull case for the biotech company Revance Therapeutics was that its banner product, a longer-lasting alternative to Botox, would steal market share from AbbVie's blockbuster by offering a product whose convenience would justify a premium price. That doesn't seem to be working out.

Yesterday, Revance said it will now price its offering, called Daxxify, "competitively to Botox" in what was essentially an admission of strategic defeat just months into the product's launch. The company's share price fell about 20% on the news.

The early optimism for Daxxify was largely driven by the assumption that aestheticians, fighting for their own market share among clients, would be quick to offer a new product before competitors did the same, and that people would be willing to pay more for a product that can be administered as infrequently as twice a year. But Botox, which has been on the market for two decades, appears to be more resilient than the company once thought.

Separations

It's OK to just break up

Yesterday, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis cut bait on a roughly $2 billion deal with BeiGene, a cancer-focused company based in China and the U.S., and relinquished its rights to an immunotherapy called Tevimbra. BeiGene, which will lose out on up to $1.6 billion in promised payments from its former partner, framed the separation as "BeiGene Strengthens Global Portfolio and Regains Full Rights from Novartis for Anti-PD-1 Antibody Tevimbra."

There's no question that the company did indeed regain the full rights to its drug when Novartis abandoned them, and it's not unreasonable to say the company's global portfolio is stronger by virtue of not having to split future profits with another company. But it also means BeiGene will bear more of the treatment's manufacturing costs, and the subtext of the news — that Novartis decided the potential profits of Tevimbra weren't worth the future payments to BeiGene — does not exactly read as positive.

That's all to say: It's OK, when crafting a press release, to just say you're breaking up.

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