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37th Annual J.P. Morgan HEALTHCARE CONFERENCE: News at #JPM2019 for Jan. 10, 2019: Deals and Announcements

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

From Biospace.com

 

JP Morgan Healthcare Conference Update: Sage, Mersana, Shutdown Woes and Babies

Speaker presenting to audience at a conference

With the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference winding down, companies remain busy striking deals and informing investors about pipeline advances. BioSpace snagged some of the interesting news bits to come out of the conference from Wednesday.

SAGE Therapeutics – Following a positive Phase III report that its postpartum depression treatment candidate SAGE-217 hit the mark in its late-stage clinical trial, Sage Therapeutics is eying the potential to have multiple treatment options available for patients. At the start of J.P. Morgan, Sage said that patients treated with SAGE-217 had a statistically significant improvement of 17.8 points in the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, compared to 13.6 for placebo. The company plans to seek approval for SAGE-2017, but before that, the FDA is expected to make a decision on Zulresso in March. Zulresso already passed muster from advisory committees in November, and if approved, would be the first drug specifically for postpartum depression. In an interview with the Business Journal, Chief Business Officer Mike Cloonan said the company believes there is room in the market for both medications, particularly since the medications address different patient populations.

 

Mersana Therapeutics – After a breakup with Takeda Pharmaceutical and the shelving of its lead product, Cambridge, Mass.-based Mersana is making a new path. Even though a partial clinical hold was lifted following the death of a patient the company opted to shelve development of XMT-1522. During a presentation at JPM, CEO Anna Protopapas noted that many other companies are developing therapies that target the HER2 protein, which led to the decision, according to the Boston Business Journal. Protopapas said the HER2 space is highly competitive and now the company will focus on its other asset, XMT-1536, an ADC targeting NaPi2b, an antigen highly expressed in the majority of non-squamous NSCLC and epithelial ovarian cancer. XMT-1536 is currently in Phase 1 clinical trials for NaPi2b-expressing cancers, including ovarian cancer, non-small cell lung cancer and other cancers. Data on XMT-1536 is expected in the first half of 2019.

Novavax – During a JPM presentation, Stan Erck, CEO of Novavax, pointed to the company’s RSV vaccine, which is in late-stage development. The vaccine is being developed for the mother, in order to protect an infant. The mother transfers the antibodies to the infant, which will provide the baby with protection from RSV in its first six months. Erck called the program historic. He said the Phase III program is in its fourth year and the company has vaccinated 4,636 women. He said they are tracking the women and the babies. Researchers call the mothers every week through the first six months of the baby’s life to acquire data. Erck said the company anticipates announcing trial data this quarter. If approved, Erck said the market for the vaccine could be a significant revenue driver.

“You have 3.9 million birth cohorts and we expect 80 percent to 90 percent of those mothers to be vaccinated as a pediatric vaccine and in the U.S. the market rate is somewhere between $750 million and a $1 billion and then double that for worldwide market. So it’s a large market and we will be first to market in this,” Erck said, according to a transcript of the presentation.

Denali Therapeutics – Denali forged a collaboration with Germany-based SIRION Biotech to develop gene therapies for central nervous disorders. The two companies plan to develop adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors to enable therapeutics to cross the blood-brain barrier for clinical applications in neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS and certain other diseases of the CNS.

AstraZeneca – Pharma giant AstraZeneca reported that in 2019 net prices on average across the portfolio will decrease versus 2018. With a backdrop of intense public and government scrutiny over pricing, Market Access head Rick Suarez said the company is increasing its pricing transparency. Additionally, he said the company is looking at new ways to price drugs, such as value-based reimbursement agreements with payers, Pink Sheet reported.

Amarin Corporation – As the company eyes a potential label expansion approval for its cardiovascular disease treatment Vascepa, Amarin Corporation has been proactively hiring hundreds of sales reps. In the fourth quarter, the company hired 265 new sales reps, giving the company a sales team of more than 400, CEO John Thero said. Thero noted that is a label expansion is granted by the FDA, “revenues will increase at least 50 percent over what we did in the prior year, which would give us revenues of approximate $350 million in 2019.”

Government Woes – As the partial government shutdown in the United States continues into its third week, biotech leaders at JPM raised concern as the FDA’s carryover funds are dwindling. With no new funding coming in, reviews of New Drug Applications won’t be able to continue past February, Pink Sheet said. While reviews are currently ongoing, no New Drug Applications are being accepted by the FDA at this time. With the halt of NDA applications, that has also caused some companies to delay plans for an initial public offering. It’s hard to raise potential investor excitement without the regulatory support of a potential drug approval. During a panel discussion, Jonathan Leff, a partner at Deerfield Management, noted that the ongoing government shutdown is a reminder of how “overwhelmingly dependent the whole industry of biotech and drug development is on government,” Pink Sheet said.

Other posts on the JP Morgan 2019 Healthcare Conference on this Open Access Journal include:

#JPM19 Conference: Lilly Announces Agreement To Acquire Loxo Oncology

36th Annual J.P. Morgan HEALTHCARE CONFERENCE January 8 – 11, 2018

37th Annual J.P. Morgan HEALTHCARE CONFERENCE: #JPM2019 for Jan. 8, 2019; Opening Videos, Novartis expands Cell Therapies, January 7 – 10, 2019, Westin St. Francis Hotel | San Francisco, California

37th Annual J.P. Morgan HEALTHCARE CONFERENCE: News at #JPM2019 for Jan. 8, 2019: Deals and Announcements

 

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Author and Curator: Dror Nir, PhD

 

As an entrepreneur who is promoting innovations in medical imaging I often find myself confronted with this question. Usually the issue is raised by a project’s potential financier by the way of the following remarks:

  • The Genome Project opens the road to “Star Track” kind of medicine. No one will need imaging.
  • What about development of new disease-specific markers? Would that put imaging out of business?
  • Soon we will have a way to “fix” bad cells’ DNA.  and so we will have no use for screening

In these situations I always find myself struggling to come up with answers rather than simply saying, ‘Well, it will take more time for these applications to be available than for you to reach your exit….’. I always try to find a quantitative citation to show how much time and money still needs to be invested before patients will be able to profit from that kind of futuristic “sci-fi medicine”.

Last week, a very recent source for such information was brought to my attention.  As a contributor to Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence I was asked to review and comment on a recent report published in Nature regarding the progress made in the ENCODE project [1]. I was also asked to assess the influence of the progress in understanding the human genome on imaging-based cancer patients’ management, my field of expertise.

This short report is nicely written and is clear to layman’s (which is what I consider myself in this field) reading. My attention was drawn to some important facts:

  • It took 10 years and $288 Million to realise that 80% of 3 Billion DNA bases comprising the human genome serves a purpose.
  • So far a very small percentage (3% to 4%) of this potential was uncovered in the scope of this project.
  • Already now it is clear that much of the “knowledge” regarding the human genome’s functionality will need to be re-written.
  • Researchers anticipate that future studies using advanced technologies will contribute to better estimation of the knowledge gap.
  • Good news: these studies are leading to better understanding of diseases’ pathological characteristics and to more accurate reporting of disease sources. This gives hope to future development of disease specific drug development.

So, back to the subject of this post: it seems to me that we are quite a few decades and many billions of dollars away from “Star-Trek medicine”. In the foreseeable  future, i.e. at least during my life time (and I hope to live a while longer…), the daily routine of cancer patients’ management will have to rely on workflows constituted of screening, diagnosis, a treatment choice that includes a trial and error type of drugs’ choice, and a long-term post treatment follow-up. Smart imaging promises to increase cost efficiency and medical efficacy of these workflows. And I do hope that our children will benefit from the investment our generation is making in understanding the way the human genome is functioning.

  1. Science 7 September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6099 pp. 1159-1161
    DOI: 10.1126/science.337.6099.1159 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6099/1159.summary?sid=835cf304-a61f-45d5-8d77-ad44b454e448

Written by Dror Nir

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