The READOUT Loud
Dave Ricks on the Trump administration, plus some Zepbound news
As we noted yesterday, Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks joined STAT's biotech podcast, "The Readout LOUD," for a discussion about all kinds of issues. You can listen to the whole episode here (and watch video of the live taping as well) or catch the highlights in a news story based on the interview here. Ricks spoke about Lilly's earnings miss, the Inflation Reduction Act, and his engagement with the incoming Trump administration.
He also made some news on Zepbound, saying Lilly is considering offering more doses in vials at lower cost. Ricks said that while he thinks some people who are relying on compounding pharmacies for the drug don't actually have obesity, he acknowledged that there are some patients who do have obesity or diabetes and are turning to compounding due to "real cost pressures" from the branded treatments. Read more.
INSURANCE
A lonely health insurer at JPM
Alignment Healthcare is looking a bit lonely at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. CEO John Kao doesn't really mind.
All of the major publicly traded health insurers either declined to appear at this year's event, expressed no interest in attending, or backed out after last month's killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. That has left Alignment, which only sells Medicare Advantage plans and has roughly $3 billion of annual revenue, as the largest insurer making a formal presentation at JPM.
Kao sat down with STAT reporter Bob Herman to talk about how Alignment is "going up against the big monoliths" by trying to serve patients and make a profit at the same time. Read more.
CANCER
Clinical trial gurus look to technology to innovate accrual, access, and more
Just enrolling patients in clinical trials can be a tough problem. Getting the right patients to the right trials — and ensuring those participants are from diverse backgrounds and places — is a challenge that trialists have been grappling with for years. Four cancer CEOs sat down at a panel hosted by Paradigm Health yesterday to discuss how they've tackled these challenges, and what they're looking for next.
Across the hour-long roundtable, the panelists looked at uses of technology from AI to telehealth to improve enrollment, access, and the speed of clinical trials. In one example, Ashley Magargee, the CEO of Genentech, pointed to the use of integrating software with oncology electronic medical records that can screen clinical trials that would potentially match patients to targeted therapy studies.
"The oncologist can see right there in their report what were the NCCN-recommended treatments, or what trials are open to recommend to that patient," she said. Magargee pointed to a proof-of-concept study to see if Genentech could run a tumor agnostic biomarker study with OneOncology using this idea — and said the concept worked.
Patients want to be on clinical trials — if they are informed about them and can access them, former American Cancer Society CEO Karen Knudsen told Ken Frazier, the former CEO of Merck, who was moderating the panel. Technology including AI and machine learning could help that goal, though Knudsen added that more barriers need to be addressed to make access equitable.
"There's plenty of room for us all to come to the table to see what happens when you take a community and say, we're gonna deploy health equity ambassadors, work with cancer centers and hospitals, and how can we all contribute to the answer," Knudsen said. "Where we are right now, illustrated beautifully by this JPM conference, is how can technology help us fill in the gaps to the workforce, gaps of patient enrollment, and gaps in barriers."
INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Gilead defends lenacapavir access plan
Gilead last year published data for a drug, lenacapavir, that can prevent HIV infection with just a single injection every six months. The closest thing to an HIV vaccine ever developed, it has the potential to transform HIV prevention globally.
Gilead, though, has faced criticism for its plans to make the medicine available around the world. It has announced an agreement to allow generic manufacturers to sell the drug cheaply in low- and middle-income countries, including those with high HIV incidence like Uganda. But the deal leaves out upper-middle-income countries that still face significant HIV infections, such as Mexico and Brazil.
At a media breakfast today, CEO Dan O'Day defended the approach, saying it's focused on "sustainability" in each country. "I mean, we're really focused on sustainable models that fit the needs, the health care needs, and the economic situation of countries," he said. "So we're not creating anything new here. We've done tiered pricing before. It is a sustainable way to make sure that countries get medicines for people in the countries that need it."
GENE-EDITING technology
Editas, after slow start, outlines plan to catch other CRISPR companies
Eleven years ago, Editas launched as the first company built around the infant gene-editing technology CRISPR. Founded by Feng Zhang, George Church, and others and backed by Flagship and Third Rock, it promised to unleash the tool on all ranges of human malady.
Yet today the company is the only one of the three original CRISPR companies to not have a medicine in clinical trials, after a series of high-profile leadership changes, the failure of an eye program, and, last month, the shelving of an effort to develop a sickle cell treatment similar to Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics' Casgevy.
CEO Gilmore O'Neil and Chief Scientist Linda Burkley were here to sell investors and partners on a new vision of Editas. In an interview, they walked through the company's plans to get back into trials with a new, in vivo approach — meaning given by simple IV infusion — to sickle cell and a gene-editing treatment targeted at the liver. The goal is to be back in trials by 2026.
Read more.
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