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Hello, everyone. Damian here with a look at biotech’s latest nadir, the virtues of Neanderthal DNA, and the sudden success of a decades-old idea in oncology.
No one knows where the biotech bottom is
The closely watched XBI biotech index hit its lowest point since 2018 yesterday, despite news of multibillion-dollar deals and a now-fleeting sense that the worst was over for the ailing sector.
The XBI is now down 18% for the year and more than 25% since June, when biotech’s fortunes appeared to be reversing. The slumping sentiment has made it that much more difficult for the industry’s many cash-strapped companies to raise money while worsening the effects of bad news on the ones that already have it.
Take Akero Therapeutics. On Oct. 10, the company lost about 60% of its value after disclosing disappointing results for an investigational NASH drug. In the ensuing two weeks, Akero has lost another 33% of its value for no discernible reason other than the vibes simply being bad in biotech.
The ‘Jurassic Park’ approach to antibiotics research
The scourge of antibiotic resistance, which kills some 500,000 people a year, is a looming threat to humanity’s future. Solutions, in the form of microbe-killing medicines, could be waiting deep in the fossilized past.
As STAT’s Jason Mast reports, that’s the idea behind Cesar de la Fuente’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where scientists have built algorithms to trawl genetic databases of ancient DNA for peptides that might function as antibiotics for tough-to-treat bugs. The team resurrects promising candidates and then tests them in mice, part of a drug-discovery process de la Fuente calls “molecular de-extinction.”
The work draws on the field of paleogenetics, for which Svante Pääbo won a Nobel Prize last year, and gives it an applied edge, betting the genomes of ancient humans, Neanderthals, giant sloths, and woolly mammoths are hiding keys to future medicines.
Twenty years in, ADCs are having a moment
The stars of this week’s big cancer conference were the humble antibody-drug conjugates, a class of medicines that, while hardly new, are newly integral to the treatment of an increasing number of tumor types.
As STAT’s Andrew Joseph reports, the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting opened to the news that Merck would pay up to $22 billion to partner on three compounds from ADC specialist Daiichi Sankyo, and then GSK followed up with an ADC licensing announcement of its own, followed by multiple ADC studies taking the top presentation spots at the conference.
It’s a sudden success roughly 20 years in the making. As long as there has been chemotherapy, researchers have been searching for ways to limit its toxic side effects while preserving or improving its effects on cancer. ADCs emerged as a way to attach blasts of chemo to antibodies that function like homing missiles, zeroing in on tumors while sparing healthy tissues. Early attempts were often too weak or too toxic, but the latest generation of ADCs promise to make good on all those years of work.
Novartis seems to be getting on just fine
In what has been a year of double-digit stock declines for Roche, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, the Swiss giant Novartis has been a rare spot of green among so much red for the biggest wheels of the pharmaceutical industry.
Novartis’ shares are up 9% on the year, and yesterday the company raised its profit forecast for the third time in 2023.
The company just completed the long-awaited spinoff of its generics business, Sandoz, and has spent years narrowing its focus on first-of-their kind medicines, like the gene therapy Zolgensma and cancer treatment Pluvicto. It appears to be paying off.
More reads
• AstraZeneca, maker of FluMist, seeks to allow at-home administration of vaccine, STAT
• Amgen to cut 350 Horizon employees after closing $27.8 billion acquisition, Bloomberg
• Medtronic CEO talks latest bets on diabetes, high blood pressure technology, STAT