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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, our roundup of the top headlines in biopharma. Earnings season continued this week, with more comments from pharma executives on the potential impact of tariffs, new details around Pfizer and Moderna’s cost-efficiency efforts, and more. Read below for a recap of the top news out of this week’s earnings calls. We’ve also got a summary of data out of the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting, where Lei Lei Wu reported from Chicago. And Endpoints News’ Andrew Dunn welcomed Arc Institute co-founder Patrick Hsu to our special Slack channel to discuss all things AI. Stay tuned next week as more companies, including BioNTech, Novo Nordisk, Takeda and more, report their earnings.  — Nicole DeFeudis 💲 More pharma companies reported their Q1 earnings this week, including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, GSK, Eli Lilly, Moderna and Amgen. Tariffs were a central theme during earnings calls, as drugmakers provided some detail on the potential impact to their business. “Our goal, as I mentioned, is to have 100% of our products produced in the US for the US,” Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said during a first-quarter earnings call with the media Tuesday. AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said the company “can actually move the manufacturing of products that are made in Europe, move it to the US for supply to the US. And we can also potentially do the other way around.” Here’s what else our reporters tracked: The privately-held biotech Stealth BioTherapeutics said its rare disease drug was delayed this week. A person familiar with the situation said the company hadn’t been asked to run more trials or provide more data, that the FDA hadn’t identified any safety concerns, and that the agency hadn’t raised manufacturing issues, Endpoints’ Max Gelman reported. The apparent delay comes amid upheaval at health agencies, though several companies have said in earnings calls and interviews in recent weeks that they aren’t seeing an impact on their interactions with the FDA so far. The agency made decisions on time for two other drugs this week: Johnson & Johnson’s rare disease drug Imaavy and Satsuma Pharmaceuticals’ migraine drug Atzumi. The agency also hit PDUFA dates for other big-name medicines in recent weeks, like Dupixent, Amvuttra, Uplizna and Eylea. Stealth’s drug had an original decision deadline in January, but the company said the FDA requested more time to review supplemental material. Max examines lingering questions around the situation here . AACR recap: Data from GSK, Merck and more 🔬Scientists descended on Chicago this week for the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting. Some in attendance, including cancer scientists, former NIH leaders and patient advocates, spoke about how cuts to science funding could impact cancer research. “It is a time to be clear-eyed about what is happening and to decide what role each of us is willing to play,” Yale oncologist Patricia LoRusso said during a panel. Read more here . Elsewhere, GSK presented data showing that its PD-1 inhibitor Jemperli induced a 100% complete response rate in 49 patients with a specific type of rectal cancer after six months. Even though the results were excellent, Endpoints’ Elizabeth Cairns reported that they are unlikely to have major commercial implications. Jemperli is already approved in this cancer type, known as mismatch repair deficient (MMRd) solid tumors, though only after the patient has progressed on prior treatment and has no further options. The new data could move the product into the neoadjuvant setting for dMMR cancers, but it’s still a tiny patient population. Only around 3% of solid tumors carry the dMMR biomarker. Merck also impressed with Keytruda data in head and neck cancer, showing that adding Keytruda before and after surgery cut the risk of disease recurrence or death by 27%. Patients in the study remained disease-free for more than four years at the median. 🌎 The US’ drug infrastructure has historically been robust, making it an attractive country in which to run clinical trials. But some companies say uncertainty is driving them to look elsewhere for their studies. Jared Whitlock examined this phenomenon in a story this week . Of note, companies find FDA Commissioner Marty Makary’s comments on rare disease approval pathways and animal testing largely promising. “Since we are in the ultra-rare disease space, Makary’s words on creating paths for rare [diseases] creates hope, and we are looking forward to learning more about his plans,” Mahzi Therapeutics CEO Yael Weiss said. While overseas trials have limitations, agencies in Europe, Canada, Australia and the UK have worked in recent years to harmonize guidelines with the FDA. 🎤 Endpoints’ Andrew Dunn welcomed Patrick Hsu to the newsroom’s Slack channel earlier this month to share his thoughts from the frontlines of the AI bio space. Hsu co-founded the Arc Institute in 2021, a Palo Alto, CA-based nonprofit research organization that has spearheaded some leading AI biology research. “I think AI will become a universal copilot that we use for everything,” he said during the interview. Read more here . DON’T MISS:

In the first quarter, sales of the top three products Amgen gained from its $27.8 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics fell far short of analyst expectations, with each seeing a double-digit sequential sales decline. It’s been 19 months since Amgen completed its $27.8 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics, and the California company is still struggling to build momentum for three of the prized possessions of the deal—rare disease drugs Uplizna, Krystexxa and Tepezza.When Amgen presented its first-quarter earnings Thursday, none of the trio met analyst expectations. With sales of $91 million, Uplizna came up $20 million short of the consensus projection. Meanwhile, Krystexxa’s haul of $236 million was $57 million shy of expectations, and Tepezza’s $381 million figure was $69 million off the mark.The shortfall for the Horizon products came during a quarter in which most of the company’s other treatments exceeded expectations. In fact, Amgen’s overall revenue of $8.1 billion was a 9% increase year over year and topped the analyst consensus. The lack of success for the Horizon drugs is apparently becoming a sore subject for Amgen execs. During a conference call, after an analyst asked about the stagnant sales of Tepezza and referred to a “couple years” since the Horizon buyout, Chief Financial Officer Peter Griffith was quick to make a correction.“Just a reminder that the transaction closed in October of 2023,” Griffith said. “It’s been about a year and a half, although so much has happened in the world it might feel like more than that.”The most vexing Horizon product has been with Tepezza, which remains the lone drug on the market for thyroid eye disease. In its second full year on the market under Horizon, in 2022, it generated $1.96 billion in revenue. But, in the following year, sales came in at $1.77 billion, followed by $1.85 billion last year, when there were signs that Tepezza was rallying.But the $381 million quarterly result for the treatment was a stunner—it’s lowest figure for a three-month period since the first quarter of 2021 and a 17% sequential decline.“Sales of Tepezza and Krystexxa were adversely impacted in the quarter by changes to U.S. wholesaler inventory levels," Amgen’s chief commercial officer Murdo Gordon explained. "We do not expect similar deductions in inventory levels for the remainder of the year."But the result sounded an alarm bell with Mizuho Securities analyst Salim Syed, who noted the 9% decline in volume and 8% decrease in inventory levels, which “likely put the Horizon acquisition into even more question,” he wrote in a note to investors.Gordon explained that the initial uptake of Tepezza was strong as it was a long-awaited answer for people who had serious cases of the eye disease and were readily prescribed the treatment from plastic surgeons. To grow sales, Tepezza needs to secure more prescriptions from general ophthalmologist and endocrinologists, he added.But tapping this segment of the market “may be more challenging to penetrate than previously communicated by the company,” analysts from Citi wrote in a note to clients.Amgen is far from abandoning hope for Tepezza. The company recently gained a thumbs-up from Europe’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use nd is ready to launch there upon an expected approval. An additional edge Amgen could secure to help spur sales would be to earn approval for a subcutaneous version of Tepezza, as opposed to the 60- to 90-minute infusions patients undergo every three weeks as it stands. A subQ option would allow patients to receive the treatment faster and in many more settings than at infusion centers. Testing on the formulation began last year.On a much smaller scale, sales also were disappointing for Uplizna, which fell sequentially from $101 million in the fourth quarter to $91 million in the first.But help has already arrived in the form of a label expansion last month, making Uplizna the first drug to win an FDA approval for immunoglobulin G4-related disease (IgG4-RD), a disease that affects 20,000 patients in the U.S. and has no standard of care. Additionally, Amgen announced Thursday that it has secured an FDA decision date of Dec. 14 for Uplizna to treat patients with generalized myasthenia gravis (gMG).With respect to all of the Horizon products, Amgen’s message on Thursday was to give them more time.“It’s a very young portfolio of products where we’re really just beginning to address the severe diseases that these drugs treat,” Jay Bradner, Amgen’s R&D chief, said. “Whether it’s Tepezza, Uplizna, Krystexxa or Tavneos, these are going to be key growth-driving products for us over the long haul.”