Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Feb 18 (Reuters) – Australia’s CSL said on Wednesday it had entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Eli Lilly and Co, granting it certain rights to develop and commercialise clazakizumab, an antibody aimed at preventing heart-related illness and death in people with end‑stage kidney disease. CSL will receive an upfront payment of $100 million and be eligible to receive potential clinical, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on global net sales. Clazakizumab blocks IL‑6 from binding its receptor, which may dampen the downstream inflammatory cascade that drives symptoms and disease progression in immuno‑inflammatory disorders, CSL said.…
Feb 18 (Reuters) – Moderna (MRNA) said on Wednesday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has agreed to review its influenza vaccine, reversing an earlier decision to reject the application, after the company made modifications. The reversal, which comes just a week after the FDA’s surprise decision to not review the company’s experimental flu vaccine application, lifted shares of the vaccine maker more than 3% before the bell. The FDA has accepted Moderna’s revised approach seeking full approval for the shot for adults aged between 50 and 64, and accelerated approval for those aged 65 and above, the company said,…
Subsidies. Love ’em or hate them, they dominated the news during the Affordable Care Act’s sign-up season, and their reduction is now hitting many enrollees in the pocketbook. While lawmakers continue to disagree on a way forward, and the politics of affordability keeps the issue front and center, it would be understandable to think these are the only taxpayer-funded health insurance subsidies in the U.S. system. But that would be wrong. “The vast majority of people with health insurance get some kind of federal subsidy for it, from Medicaid to Medicare to the ACA to employer-sponsored insurance,” said Larry Levitt,…
NEW YORK (AP) — Debra Whitman was traveling for work when her father was suddenly admitted to the hospital in serious pain. She jetted home to Maryland and took several days off to care for him in his rural community in eastern Washington state and to set him up with a motorized lift chair that would help him stand up. Fortunately for Whitman, who serves as chief public policy officer at AARP, her employer offers paid time off for caregiving for elderly family members, a benefit which experts say is growing in popularity as the U.S. population ages. “Instead of…
Feb 19 (Reuters) – Cassava Sciences said on Thursday the U.S. Department of Justice had ended its probe into the company regarding allegations of research misconduct for its experimental Alzheimer’s drug simufilam. The company said the probe ended four months after the Justice Department dismissed a criminal indictment in Maryland accusing Hoau-Yan Wang, a medical professor and former Cassava adviser who allegedly submitted false data regarding the drug. Cassava scrapped the development of the drug for Alzheimer’s last year following disappointing clinical trial results. The biotech has previously been charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading claims…
By Jonathan Stempel Feb 19 (Reuters) – The Washington Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that Amazon.com must face lawsuits by families that lost relatives who died by suicide after consuming sodium nitrite they bought from outside vendors on the retailer’s website. All nine justices rejected a ruling by an intermediate-level appeals court that the families could not sue Amazon for negligence because suicide was a superseding cause of their relatives’ deaths. Justice G. Helen Whitener wrote that Amazon owed customers a duty of reasonable care, and must avoid exposing them to “harm from the foreseeable conduct of a third…
Feb 19 (Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson is preparing a potential sale of the orthopedics unit that it has been planning to separate, with big buyout firms already circling, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The business, known as DePuy Synthes, could be valued at more than $20 billion in a sale, according to Bloomberg. The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. J&J last year said it had planned to separate its orthopedics business into a standalone company within the next 18 to 24 months, marking its second major spinoff…
Feb 19 (Reuters) – German biopharmaceutical company BioNTech sued Moderna in Delaware federal court on Thursday, alleging that Moderna’s COVID-19 shot mNEXSPIKE infringes a patent related to COVID vaccine technology. The lawsuit said that mNEXSPIKE, Moderna’s next-generation COVID shot approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2025, violates BioNTech’s rights in technology for a streamlined messenger RNA-based vaccine design that can be given to patients at a lower dosage. Moderna sued BioNTech and its partner Pfizer for patent infringement over their COVID shot Comirnaty in 2022, in a lawsuit that is ongoing. The cases are among a wave…
By Marcelo Teixeira NEW YORK, Feb 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. sugar industry could be impacted by regulatory changes as the federal government prepares to implement stricter dietary guidelines that could further reduce domestic demand for the sweetener, a top industry executive said on Thursday. New school meal standards, updated dietary recommendations calling for zero added sugars, and rising use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs could reduce sugar consumption at a time when federal agencies are also working to define what is classified as “processed food,” potentially triggering new labeling requirements or taxes on products. Courtney Gaine, president and CEO of…
Feb 23 (Reuters) – Novo Nordisk’s next-generation weight-loss drug CagriSema was less effective than Eli Lilly’s Zepbound in a head-to-head trial, a fresh blow to the Danish drugmaker’s efforts to reclaim its early lead in the booming obesity drug market. Below are some reactions from analysts. Michael Leuchten, Jefferies “Where all of this is a headache is that Novo’s terminal value pivots around amycretin, which like CagriSema is a GLP-1/amylin combination (albeit in one molecule), so the failure of REDEFINE-4 and commercial uncertainty versus competition does little to calm long-term investor nerves.” “Investors’ focus will likely now turn to management’s…