Paul Hudson spells out new $6.15B technology play as Sanofi goes drug hunting in oncology, immunology

Sanofi now has another powerful weapon in its arsenal to deploy against a wide variety of targets across oncology, immunology and inflammation.
Tying the knot with IGM Biosciences, the French pharma giant is plopping down a sizable, $150 million upfront to access its IgM antibody technology platform — with an eye firmly on agonists rather than inhibitors — while laying out $6 billion in potential milestones and opportunities for 50:50 profit-sharing arrangements.
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Disturbed or impaired sleep has been the subject of increased research attention in recent years, as both a primary disorder and in cases where disturbed sleep is a symptom of another disease. Disturbed sleep is common in people with arthritis, atopic dermatitis, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and many other conditions. Research is focused on measuring and diagnosing these sleep disorders, as well as the development of new treatments to improve sleep across a broad range of indications. Wearable devices provide a low-burden and remote approach to objectively quantify people’s sleep in their real life, often revealing meaningful insights that might not be available with polysomnography or self-report data. While sleep architecture and sleep staging are difficult to estimate with accelerometry alone, actigraphy is sensitive to treatment effects in previous studies of sleep disorders.1
The billionaire backer behind the troubled Alzheimer’s startup Athira Pharma — and a close associate of ousted CEO Leen Kawas — is making a bid to purge the new CEO and put himself on the board alongside ex-Novartis CFO George Bickerstaff.
Reuters reports today that they have seen a letter from Richard “Ric” Kayne harshly criticizing Mark Litton, who stepped in as CEO after Kawas exited when the board concluded that she had manipulated images used in her doctoral thesis and other papers that were at the center of Athira’s approach to treating Alzheimer’s.
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In a disappointing setback for one of the brightest candidates in the next-gen checkpoint race, tiragolumab — Roche’s “breakthrough” TIGIT drug — has failed a Phase III trial.
The candidate failed to meet the co-primary endpoint of progression-free survival among a group of patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer (ES-SCLC), Roche disclosed Wednesday morning. Overall survival, the other co-primary endpoint in the SKYSCRAPER-02 study, was not met at the interim analysis and is “unlikely to reach statistical significance at the planned final analysis,” the company added.
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Coming off the primetime Oscars launch of its first Leqvio TV ad, Novartis is prepping a broader down-to-earth campaign for the cholesterol-lowering med.
The “Never Give Up” campaign is set to begin running Monday on primetime TV. The multi-channel effort includes the initial Academy Awards show commercial and a second ad with a male central character. John, who like Gloria in the first TV ad, is an atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) patient whose long and busy life is shown in similar time-lapse images recapping highlights.
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A Covid-19 vaccine from a lab out of Baylor University’s National School of Tropical Medicine arose from efforts that stemmed from the 2004 SARS outbreak, which killed 774 people, many in China. It was largely ignored when government agencies and pharma companies alike refused to finance human trials, but when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, Peter Hotez and Maria Bottazzi brought it back to the drawing board and entered the vaccine in Phase III trials in India.
After dashing investors’ hopes last fall on the earning potential of the recently FDA-approved diabetes treatment Zegalogue, Zealand Pharma is radically changing up its game plan.
The Danish biotech, which has seen its share price $ZEAL slide by about 50% over the past year, is gutting its US operations, looking for some strategic partnerships to manage Zegalogue and V-GO, its wearable for blood sugar control. The company is eliminating 90% of its US workforce in the next few months — without telling us the numbers — with more layoffs to come in Denmark. More pacts are also planned for the pipeline products.
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When Berra Yazar-Klosinski was wrapping up her PhD in molecular cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz, there was an unassuming little office right down the road, hidden inside a bungalow-style house with a postage-square lawn.
Tucked away on a busy street, the building didn’t strike Yazar-Klosinski as the type of place where scientific research would occur. But inside, she would learn, was the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit working on turning psychedelics into medicines for a host of mental illnesses.
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And the Academy Award goes to … pharma?
Maybe a bit of a stretch, but Sunday night’s Hollywood awards broadcast included an unexpected five TV ads from pharma industry companies – Pfizer, which was also a leading sponsor of the awards show, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Incyte and Exact Sciences.
It’s an unusual turn for the industry – the Academy Awards are pricey media placements and the celebrity dress-to-impress fest tends to draw more lifestyle brands than healthcare reminders. Still, the Oscars, along with mega-sports events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, are remaining rare opportunities in today’s media-fragmented world to reach a primetime mass audience. Cost for a 30-second spot this year ranged from $1.7 million to $2.2 million and Disney’s ABC sold out all 60 spots by last week, according to a Variety report.
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Already on the tail end of a boom, the once-hot SPAC market could soon be chilled even further.
The SEC will propose new rules around blank check companies that, among other things, would cut the legal protections that companies have relied on to make optimistic predictions about future mergers, Bloomberg reported. Under those rules, investors can sue over inaccurate SPAC forecasts.
Over the past year, a sizable group of biotech investors took advantage of buoyant market conditions to steer blank companies to Nasdaq — raising hundreds of millions on nothing but the promise of spotting a brilliant private company and taking it public via a merger.
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