AstraZeneca (AZ) and Absci have entered into a collaboration agreement worth up to $247m to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-designed antibody drug for a specified oncology target. The partnership will combine AZ’s capabilities in oncology research and development with Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation platform, which the generative AI company says “unlocks the potential to accelerate time to clinic and increase the probability of success by simultaneously optimising multiple drug characteristics important to both development and therapeutic benefit”. The agreement includes an upfront commitment from AZ as well as research and development funding, milestone payments and royalties on product sales. Puja Sapra, senior vice president of biologics engineering and oncology targeted delivery at AZ, said: “This collaboration is an exciting opportunity to utilise Absci’s de novo AI antibody creation platform to design a potential new antibody therapy in oncology.” Absci outlines that its approach “overcomes the limits of traditional drug discovery”. ...
As Johnson & Johnson places a magnifying glass on its pharmaceutical business, the focus for the remainder of the decade rests on the shoulders of some 25 new and upcoming drugs. Together, those meds will help the company deliver pharmaceutical sales growth of 5% to 7% between 2025 and 2030, the company said Tuesday. That phalanx of novel products will be essential as J&J’s longstanding immunology star, Stelara, nears its tumble over the patent cliff. Last year, the drug generated $9.7 billion and was J&J’s top product by sales. During an enterprise business review Tuesday, J&J laid out its expectations across the 2025 to 2030 timeframe. Chief among those, J&J says it will boast 10 or more drugs with peak sales potential of at least $5 billion, including cancer launches Talvey and Tecvayli, plus another 15-plus products with sales potential of at least $1 billion. The latter group of therapeutics ...
As AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and BeiGene are battling it out in the same BTK inhibitor market, Eli Lilly is trailblazing a new path for the blood cancer drug class. On Friday, Dec.1, the FDA granted accelerated approval to Lilly’s Jaypirca for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL) who have received at least two prior lines of therapy. Jaypirca, which is itself a BTK inhibitor, is now allowed following treatment with a BTK inhibitor and a BCL-2 inhibitor. The ability to help patients who have failed on a BTK inhibitor makes Jaypirca unique. The Lilly med is a non-covalent BTK inhibitor that binds to BTK by a mechanism different from existing covalent agents, namely AbbVie/J&J’s Imbruvica, AZ’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa. “Once patients with CLL or SLL have progressed on covalent BTK inhibitor and BCL-2 inhibitor therapies, treatments are limited and outcomes can be ...
Americans can’t afford their medications. About 25% leave prescriptions unfilled, split pills, or skip doses. Seniors face challenges covering non-Medicare services, including prescriptions. Even those with commercial health insurance are not immune. One-third of insured adults worry about affording their premiums, and 44% must meet increasingly high deductibles before insurance even kicks in. As a result, 41% of adults carry substantial medical debt. At the same time, FDA approvals for therapeutics targeting rare diseases are on the rise, including those for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many previously untreatable diseases. In fact, 54% of 2022’s novel drug approvals targeted rare diseases. They encompass groundbreaking therapies like the first acid sphingomyelinase deficiency treatment, a prurigo nodularis remedy, and an obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy therapy. In 2023, the first enzyme replacement therapy for non-neurological alpha-mannosidosis effects gained early approval. Breakthroughs, though welcome, are staggeringly expensive. In fact, Hemgenix, a new treatment for hemophilia, is officially ...
The top three areas of concern for employers in 2024 include rising healthcare costs, mental health challenges and cancer care, according to a recent report from Business Group on Health. By MARISSA PLESCIA There are several challenges and trends employers should keep tabs on in 2024, with rising healthcare costs topping the list, according to a report the Business Group on Health released on Tuesday. Washington, D.C.-based Business Group on Health is a non-profit organization representing large employers on health benefits and health policy issues. Here are the three top healthcare trends for employers in 2024: 1. Rising healthcare costs: Healthcare costs are expected to continue to climb in 2024 due to inflation, provider shortages, growing mental health challenges and missed preventive screenings that led to more costly health conditions. Other major cost drivers include expensive cell and gene therapies and GLP-1s. “A confluence of factors are creating a fever ...
Canada-based Phenomic AI has landed two strategic collaborations this week with Boehringer Ingelheim and Astellas-owned cell therapy biotech Xyphos Biosciences to develop cancer therapies. Phenomic and Boehringer have teamed up on a target identification collaboration, announced on 29 November. Under the deal, Phenomic will receive an upfront payment of $9m and may be entitled to up to $500m in research funding and milestones. The Canadian company hasn’t disclosed the financial terms of the deal with Astellas, but the companies aim to develop cell therapies with an antibody directed at a novel target of the tumour stroma, utilising Phenomic’s scTx platform. The company singled out colorectal and pancreatic cancers as being stroma-rich, which would be amenable to being targeted by Phenomic’s platform. These developments mark the first deals announced by Phenomic in three years since the company launched in 2020 with $6m in seed funding. Phenomic’s scTx is a single-cell RNA ...
Eli Lilly has entered into a licence and collaboration agreement with PRISM BioLab aimed at discovering oral inhibitors of a protein-protein interaction (PPI) target, with the deal worth over $660m. The partnership centres around PRISM’s proprietary PepMetics technology, which the Japanese biotech says has the potential to “expand the field of drug discovery by turning previously undruggable PPIs into targets readily druggable with small molecules and by generating oral small molecule alternatives for injectable biologics”. Despite PPI dysfunction being implicated in a broad range of diseases, including cancer, fibrosis and autoimmune disorders, only a small proportion of PPIs are targeted by approved drugs. Lilly, which will select the first PPI target, has the option to add another two to the collaboration and will be responsible for the clinical development and commercialisation of any resulting products. In exchange, PRISM will receive undisclosed upfront payments from Lilly and will be eligible to ...
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced its intention to investigate the safety of CAR-T therapies following reports that they could be linked to the development of T-cell cancers. Following reports from clinical trials and post-marketing adverse event data sources, the wide probe is directed at patients who received treatment with all currently approved BCMA- or CD19-directed autologous CAR-T cell immunotherapies. CAR-T-cell therapy is a type of immunotherapy that involves collecting and using patients’ own immune cells to treat conditions including lymphoma, leukaemia and multiple myeloma. T-cell malignancies have been seen in patients treated with several approved products in the class, including Bristol Myers Squibb’s (BMS) Abecma (idecabtagene vicleucel) and Breyanzi (lisocabtagene maraleucel), Johnson & Johnson and Legend Biotech’s Carvykti (ciltacabtagene autoleucel), Novartis’s Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel), and Gilead and Kite’s Yescarta’s Tecartus (brexucabtagene autoleucel) and Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel). Currently, the potential risk of developing secondary malignancies is labelled as ...
Boehringer Ingelheim and IBM have announced a partnership aimed at advancing generative artificial intelligence (AI) and foundation models for therapeutic antibody development. The collaboration agreement will see Boehringer use an IBM-developed, pre-trained AI model that will be “further fine-tuned” on the German drugmaker’s specific proprietary data to help accelerate the pace at which it can create new antibody therapeutics. The companies noted that, despite “major” technological advances, the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies against diverse targets remains a “highly complex and time-consuming process”. IBM’s foundation model technologies, which have already shown success in generating biologics and small molecules with relevant target affinities, are used to design antibody candidates for specific disease targets. These are then screened with AI-enhanced simulation to select and refine the best binders for the target. Boehringer Ingelheim outlined that it will produce small quantities of the candidates that can be tested experimentally. Andrew Nixon, global ...
Don Tracy, Associate Editor Blenrep significantly extended the time to disease progression or death against existing care methods as a second-line treatment for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. GSK announced positive results from an interim analysis of its DREAMM-7 head-to-head Phase 3 trial evaluating belantamab mafodotin (Blenrep) as a second-line treatment for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. According to a company press release, the trial met its primary endpoint of progression-free survival (PFS) and showed that Blenrep when combined with bortezomib plus dexamethasone (BorDex) significantly extended the time to disease progression or death versus daratumumab plus BorDex, an existing standard of care for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.1 “Patients with multiple myeloma need treatment options after first relapse that are efficacious, readily accessible and have novel mechanisms of action,” said Hesham Abdullah, SVP, global head, oncology, R&D, GSK, in a press release.1 “We are particularly encouraged by the potential for belantamab mafodotin ...
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