Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Two Arthritis Drugs Help Severe Covid
The Guardian: Arthritis Drugs Could Help Save Lives Of Covid Patients, Research Finds
Two drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis could help to save the lives of one in 12 intensive care patients with severe Covid, researchers have found. The NHS will begin using tocilizumab to treat coronavirus patients from Friday, health officials said after results from about 800 patients confirmed the drug brings benefits, potentially cutting the relative risk of death by 24%. Another arthritis drug, sarilumab, appears to do the same, not only saving lives but cutting the length of time patients spent in intensive care. (Davis, 1/7)
Bloomberg: Covid-19 Treatments: Arthritis Drugs Reduced Deaths, ICU Time In Study
The U.K. will start using a Roche Holding AG arthritis drug to treat critically ill Covid-19 patients after a study showed that it reduced mortality and shortened recovery times in intensive care. Some 27% of critically ill patients who got the Roche arthritis drug Actemra or a similar treatment from Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. died in the hospital, compared with about 36% of those who didn’t get them, an Imperial College London research team said. Those treated with the medicines were able to be released from the hospital an average of a week earlier, the study found. (Kresge, 1/7)
In other pharmaceutical and biotech news —
The Washington Post: The U.S. Paid A Texas Company Nearly $70 Million For Ventilators That Were Unfit For Covid-19 Patients. Why?
This spring, amid a panic over a shortage of ventilators to treat the anticipated surge in coronavirus cases, the Pentagon announced the purchase of $84 million worth of breathing machines from four companies. One of the ventilators, the SAVe II+, made by a small Plano, Tex.-based company called AutoMedx, stood out from the rest. ... Defense Department medical workers who had been told to use the existing SAVe II device on covid-19 patients quickly came to the conclusion that it was ill-suited for the coronavirus pandemic, and began to voice their consternation to each other in emails that were shared with The Washington Post. (Albergotti and Reed , 1/7)
Stat: Sarepta Gene Therapy For Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Stumbles
Sarepta Therapeutics on Thursday announced mixed results from the first randomized clinical trial of its gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, raising questions about the path forward for the one-time, potentially curative treatment. A single infusion of the treatment, called SRP-9001, produced large increases in a crucial muscle protein typically missing in children born with Duchenne. But the increases failed to coincide with statistically significant improvements in muscle function for all patients after one year. (Feuerstein, 1/7)
FierceHealthcare: Northwell Health Researchers Using Facebook Data And AI To Spot Early Stages Of Severe Psychiatric Illness
Feinstein Institutes and IBM researchers studied archives of people in an early treatment program to extract meaning from the data to gain an understanding of how people with mental illness use social media. ... The study analyzed Facebook data for the 18 months prior to help predict a patient’s diagnosis or hospitalization a year in advance. (Horowitz, 1/6)
Boston Globe: With Biotech Funding At ‘All-Time High,’ Scorpion Scoops Up $162 Million
Just over two months after announcing its debut with $108 million in funding, Boston startup Scorpion Therapeutics said Thursday it has raised an even larger amount of venture capital. Scorpion, which focuses on “precision medicine” for cancer, said it has completed a $162 million funding round, bringing the biotech’s total venture haul to about $270 million. (Anissa Gardizy, 1/7)
Stat: Serial Biotech Entrepreneur John Hood Targets Deadly Lung Disease
John Hood is at it again. In 2016, Hood started a company, Impact BioMedicines, around a medicine that had been abandoned by the drug giant Sanofi. Impact raised $22 million in October 2017, and then was purchased in January 2018 by Celgene for more than $2 billion. (Herper, 1/7)
