Health

Sanofi, Novavax, Maze x Shionogi news

Published

2 months ago

May 10, 2024

Want to stay up to date on the science and politics driving biotechnology today? Sign up to receive our biotech newsletter in your inbox.

Hello everyone. Today we talk about improving the global reach of gene therapies, and why providing access to ancestral populations could be so powerful. We see in a KFF poll that a majority of Americans want obesity drugs to be covered by Medicare, offer a cool new podcast, and more.

What you need to know this morning

Sanofi entered into a licensing agreement to sell Novavax’s Covid shot in the future and try to combine the vaccine with Sanofi’s own flu shot. The pact includes an upfront payment of $500 million, with up to $700 million in future payments if regulatory and launch milestones are met.
Maze therapy and the Japanese drug manufacturer Shionogi announced a global licensing agreement for Maze’s investigational treatment for Pompe disease. The transaction, which includes a $150 million payment from Shionogi to Maze, was completed months after a Sanofi partnership for the same Maze drug was terminated due to opposition from U.S. antitrust regulators.

Improving global access to gene therapies

Gene therapies can be powerful, but are really only available to a small portion of the world’s population. Some scientists are looking for ways to increase access to these expensive treatments around the world; one earlier this week Scientific translational medicine The editorial outlined the challenges of making this all possible.

STAT’s Jason Mast chatted with co-author Jennifer Adair, who is developing scalable, low-cost gene therapies at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and helped found the Global Gene Therapy Initiative.

Adair emphasized that considering genetic diversity and targeting ancestral populations in places like Africa is critical to creating powerful – and accessible – gene therapies.

“Gene therapy not only can and should do better – our entire field is based on people’s genetics and harnesses them for human health,” she said. “And if you want to make a medicine that works, that is based on genetics, you have to take into account the most ancestral population. So we have an obligation to do better and do better very quickly.”

The public wants Medicare to cover obesity medications

From Elaine Chen: Medicare is currently not allowed to cover weight loss medications, but a majority of the public believes this should change, he said a new poll by health policy research organization KFF.

About 61% of adults say Medicare should cover these drugs, including 66% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans, according to the poll conducted in late April that surveyed 1,479 adults.

Novo Nordisk’s obesity drug Wegovy was recently approved to prevent cardiovascular complications, so Medicare can reimburse the drug for that use, but still not for weight-loss purposes. Lawmakers have introduced a bill that would allow Medicare to cover weight-loss treatments, but it remains stuck in Congress, in part because of the high projected costs to the government.

The poll also found that GLP-1s are widely used for diabetes and obesity. About 12% of adults, or one in eight, say they have ever used a GLP-1 drug, with 6% saying they are currently taking one. More specifically, 43% of adults who have been told by a doctor that they have diabetes report taking these medications, while the percentage of adults who have been told that they are overweight or obese is smaller, at 22% .

Everything you need to know about H5N1 bird flu

What happens if a common virus jumps from birds to cows? And should we be concerned?

This week on “The Readout LOUD,” STAT senior infectious disease reporter Helen Branswell walks us through the ongoing H5N1 outbreak in the U.S. and issues monitoring its spread. It’s also Pulitzer week at “The Readout LOUD”! In a bit of shameless self-promotion, we’ll talk to our colleagues Bob Herman and Casey Ross about being named a Pulitzer finalist in investigative reporting for their reporting on United Healthcare’s use of algorithms in coverage decisions. We’ll hear what’s happened since their explosive work was published last year.

Listen.

Why Exact Sciences shares paradoxically fell

Shares of Exact Sciences tumbled this week, despite the company beating market expectations in the first quarter. That’s because there are concerns that growth at the $10 billion company could slow, writes STAT’s Jonathan Wosen. Exact’s flagship product is Cologuard, a screening test for colon cancer that was approved by the FDA in 2014. Next year, the company expects to release an updated version of this test, which will demonstrate higher sensitivity and specificity.

Although colonoscopies remain the more reliable tool to screen for colon cancer, Cologuard is considered a handy second. But liquid biopsy players like Guardant Health are creeping into the equation and could change the cancer screening landscape. Exact Sciences acquired its own liquid biopsy company, Thrive, in 2020 for approximately $2 billion.