The need-to-know this morning
- Sanofi reached a licensing deal to sell Novavax's Covid shot going forward as well as to try to combine the vaccine with Sanofi's own flu shot. The pact includes a $500 million upfront payment, with up to $700 million in future payments if regulatory and launch milestones are achieved.
- Maze Therapeutics and the Japanese drugmaker Shionogi announced a global licensing deal for Maze's experimental treatment for Pompe disease. The transaction, which includes a $150 million payment from Shionogi to Maze, was completed months after a Sanofi partnership for the same Maze drug was terminated due to opposition from U.S. antitrust regulators.
gene therapy
Improving global access to gene therapies
Gene therapies can be potent, but they're really only available to a narrow slice of the global populace. Some scientists are looking at ways to broaden access around the world to these costly treatments; earlier this week, a Science Translational Medicine editorial outlined the challenges to making it all happen.
STAT's Jason Mast chatted with co-author Jennifer Adair, who is developing scalable, low-cost gene therapies at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and helped found the Global Gene Therapy Initiative.
Adair emphasized that considering genetic diversity, and targeting ancestral populations in places like Africa, is critical to making potent — and accessible — gene therapies.
"Gene therapy not only can do better and should do better — our entire field is based on the genetics of humans and leveraging that for human health," she said. "And if you want to make a drug that works, that is based on genetics, it ought to be considering the most ancestral population. So we have an obligation to do better and do it better very quickly."
Read more.
glp-1 drugs
The public wants Medicare to cover obesity drugs
From Elaine Chen: Medicare is currently barred from covering drugs for weight losses purposes, but a majority of the public thinks that should change, according to a new poll by health policy research organization KFF.
Roughly 61% of adults say they think Medicare should cover these medications, including 66% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans, according to the poll, which was conducted in late April and surveyed 1,479 adults.
Novo Nordisk's obesity drug Wegovy was recently approved to prevent cardiovascular complications, so Medicare can cover the drug for that usage, but still not for weight loss purposes. Legislators have proposed a bill that would allow Medicare to cover treatments for weight loss, but it's stalling in Congress, in part due to the high anticipated cost to the government.
The poll also found that GLP-1s for diabetes and obesity are widely used. About 12% of adults, or one in eight, say they have taken a GLP-1 drug at one point in time, including 6% who say they're currently taking one. More specifically 43% of adults who have been told by a doctor that they have diabetes report having taken these drugs, while the percentage for adults who have been told they're overweight or obese is smaller, at 22%.
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