STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about the 340B drug pilot program, an obesity drug disappointment, and more
STAT's Pharmalittle column is a roundup of the day's pharmaceutical news, opening with light weekend-planning banter before turning to three substantive items.
The first concerns an obesity drug from Boehringer Ingelheim and Zealand Pharma that helped patients with diabetes shed as much as 13.1% of their body weight — a result Bloomberg News characterized as disappointing. Boehringer had pitched the medicine as a way to help patients lose fat while preserving muscle, but without that edge the drug becomes just another contender in a market increasingly dominated by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. Boehringer pushed back on the suggestion that the drug might be only a niche product, saying upcoming studies in heart and liver health will more clearly demonstrate its potential.
The second item covers the upcoming midterm elections, which STAT says are setting the stage for unusually significant changes to Senate committees that play important roles in health care. Both the finance and health committees could see major turnover, though for different reasons; if Democrats take control of the Senate they would run the committees, but changes in GOP membership could still influence the panels' direction. More than five of the Senate Finance Committee's 14 Republicans are set to leave, and the outlook for the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee is even harder to predict with the departure of chairman Bill Cassidy.
The third item reports that Novartis signed a licensing deal worth about $7.8 billion with Chinese biotech Abogen to advance RNA-based therapy. Novartis gains exclusive rights to Abogen's experimental drug ABO2203 plus options to license other therapies built on Abogen's RNA technology, including additional experimental medicines from the platform. The drug is designed to treat autoimmune diseases by targeting B cells, the immune cells that drive disease in conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The excerpt is truncated by STAT's paywall, so the piece likely includes further items on the 340B drug pilot program referenced in the headline.