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Good morning. I’m nonetheless recovering from yesterday, when Chicago was reportedly colder than Antarctica. I hope you’re all staying heat wherever you might be. Let’s get into the information as we speak.
The necessity-to-know this morning
Johnson & Johnson kicked off the fourth-quarter and 2024 year-end earnings season. The well being care big reported adjusted fourth-quarter earnings of $2.04 per share on whole income of $22.52 billion.
Bispecific antibodies are the most cancers subject’s newest ‘gold rush’
The primary technology of immune checkpoint inhibitors, medicine that may assist make the immune system acknowledge and destroy most cancers extra aggressively, have lengthy been pillars of most cancers remedy. Researchers and drug corporations at the moment are turning their consideration towards a brand new technology of immunotherapies: bispecific antibodies that concentrate on a mix of the proteins VEGF and both PD-1 or PD-L1.
There’s been a surge of curiosity in these kind of compounds in the previous few months, spurred by promising scientific information from Summit Therapeutics and BioNTech. “We’re positively seeing a gold rush right here,” one biotech chief mentioned.
What’s so particular about these molecules? Evidently combining the targets right into a single bispecific antibody is vital, main the method to be doubtlessly simpler and fewer poisonous than giving two completely different antibodies on the identical time.
Learn extra from STAT’s Angus Chen.
Chinese language biotech says it is going to begin first in vivo beta-thalassemia trial
From my colleague Jason Mast: Main U.S. gene-editing biotechs are racing to develop the primary remedy that may treatment sickle cell illness with a easy IV infusion. Such an in vivo method could possibly be far safer and extra scalable than Casgevy, Vertex’s CRISPR-based remedy, which requires sufferers’ blood cells to be eliminated, edited in a lab, after which re-infused. Poisonous chemotherapy is required to filter outdated cells.
On Monday, Chinese language biotech YolTech Therapeutics introduced it will begin what seems to be the primary trial testing such a remedy. It’ll focus first on beta-thalassemia, a associated blood dysfunction, however each situations might be handled with the identical method. Beta-thalassemia is extra widespread in China than sickle cell illness.
YolTech’s announcement comes amid rising anxieties amongst U.S. drug builders over competitors from China, the place cheaper expertise and supplies and a distinct regulatory regime can speed up growth. U.S. corporations — together with Editas Medication, Tessera Therapeutics, and Beam Therapeutics — have been imprecise about after they count on to start out in vivo sickle cell trials.
Most, together with YolTech, are successfully utilizing iterations of the identical method, making an attempt to focus on lipid nanoparticles, loaded with CRISPR enzymes, to blood stem cells within the bone marrow. The problem has been reaching and correcting a sub-group of significantly long-lived cells that can hold pumping out new wholesome cells for years to return.
But when they will clear up it, there’s an enormous market: Solely two U.S. sufferers are identified to have acquired Vertex’s remedy in its first yr after approval, partly due to the conditioning required, and the remedy isn’t accessible in any a part of Africa or India, the place many of the world’s sickle cell sufferers dwell.
Opinion: Medicare negotiations want a flooring value
To make sure that Medicare’s drug value negotiations defend innovation, the method ought to contain setting a flooring value that displays the worth of a drug to sufferers, argues Darius Lakdawalla, chief scientific officer on the USC Schaeffer Middle for Well being Coverage & Economics, in a brand new opinion piece.
Presently, Medicare has a method for negotiating costs down from a “ceiling value.” A flooring value method, although, “would function a test in opposition to arbitrarily giant value cuts,” Lakdawalla writes, and the 2 pricing formulation mixed would set excessive and low boundaries and provide guideposts for drugmakers and their buyers.
“The shortage of predictability undermines the objective of encouraging higher innovation, as a result of if as we speak’s buyers can’t anticipate how drug costs shall be set 10 years from now, they’re prone to discover different locations to place their cash,” he writes.
Learn extra.
Biotech founders have extra diluted possession than in different sectors
Sometimes in enterprise capital, new buyers take part every new spherical of funding, main the possession stake of the founding group to say no. A brand new report concluded that founding groups in biotech are inclined to expertise larger dilution in possession than startups that promote digital merchandise like these within the well being tech, fin tech, and software program sectors.
In biotech, founding groups maintain a median 50% possession stake after the seed spherical, a determine that drops all the way down to 11% after the Collection B, in keeping with the info, analyzed by Carta, an organization that provides software program providers to startups and buyers.
As compared, in well being tech, the median possession stake for founding groups after the seed spherical is 54%, and it drops down to twenty% after the Collection B.
Sectors that make bodily merchandise are extra reliant on preliminary capital and intensive analysis and growth earlier than manufacturing can start, and the tradeoff for elevating that capital can in some instances be larger dilution, the report mentioned.
The report additionally discovered that biotech startups on common have bigger founding groups than corporations in all the opposite sectors that had been analyzed. Among the many biotech startups that Carta checked out, 13% had one founder, whereas 20% had 5 founders.
Extra reads
Crushed down below Biden, huge pharma hopes for brand spanking new chapter below Trump, Wall Avenue Journal
Sanofi is warned by the FDA over ‘vital’ issues at a key manufacturing plant, STAT
Eleos raises $60 million for AI scribe for behavioral well being suppliers, STAT
