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Hello! I hope your weekend was a wonderful one. Today we talk about AbbVie’s excessive marketing spend, see how GLP-1s impact cancer rates, and more.
The must-know this morning
- Eli Lilly said it will acquire Morphic Holding, a biotech company developing a treatment for inflammatory bowel disease. Lilly will pay about $3.2 billion to buy the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company. That translates to $57 per share, a premium of about 79% to Morphic’s closing price on Friday.
- Ideaya Biosciences reported results of an interim study shows a tumor response rate of 39% for the experimental cancer drug IDE397 in bladder and lung cancer patients with an MTAP deletion.
- HilleVax said his experimental vaccine against norovirus failed to reduce serious gastrointestinal events compared with placebo in infants enrolled in a mid-phase clinical trial. The company plans to halt development of the vaccine, called HIL-214, in infants but could explore further development in adults.
AbbVie has spent far more than its rivals in drug promotion
AbbVie spent a whopping $145.7 million on marketing to health care providers last year, a STAT analysis of government data shows. These hefty expenses, the highest of any pharmaceutical company since 2017, include payments for consulting, consultation fees, travel and meals for doctors.
In contrast, companies of similar size, such as Pfizer and Merck, spent significantly less, about $32 million and $22 million, respectively. Here’s why: AbbVie is losing its monopoly on Humira – so the company is now heavily promoting other drugs in its arsenal. AbbVie’s marketing dollars went largely to paying doctors to speak at events and providing millions of meals to healthcare providers.
“It boggles the mind when you see numbers that are so high just for marketing and promotion alone,” a Yale professor who has studied these trends told STAT’s Nicholas Florko and J. Emory Parker.
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More legal battles over patents on Gilead’s HIV pill
The Biden administration is appealing a decision in which a federal court jury sided with Gilead Sciences last year over the rights to a pair of breakthrough HIV pills — and at least $1 billion in royalties may be at stake .
At issue are the battle over patents for Truvada and a newer, improved version called Descovy — two highly effective and lucrative drugs — and the role the federal government plays in preventing the transmission of a highly contagious disease plaguing the U.S. government . the American public for decades.
After a brief trial in May 2023, a jury found that Gilead did not infringe any patents held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that those patents were invalid. The judge in the case later overruled the jury and ruled that the CDC patents had not been infringed. The appeal filed by the U.S. Department of Justice seeks to further overturn the jury’s ruling that the patents were invalid.
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GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy are better at reducing the risk of 10 obesity-related cancers compared to other diabetes drugs such as insulin and metformin, a new study shows. Notably, compared with patients taking insulin, patients taking GLP-1s saw a 65% lower risk of gallbladder cancer, a 59% lower risk of pancreatic cancer and a 53% lower risk of hepatocellular carcinoma – although the study found a slightly higher risk . risk of kidney cancer. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, examined more than 1.6 million type 2 diabetes patients between 2005 and 2018.
“Given the obesity epidemics we have in the US, the Western world and also in the developing world, this has the potential to be an extremely important intervention to prevent cancer from a public health perspective,” an oncologist who was not involved was at the STAT investigation. Rohan Rajeev.
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Judge rules against Boehringer in Medicare negotiations
A federal judge last week rejected Boehringer Ingelheim’s challenge to the Medicare drug pricing bargaining program, marking another legal setback for the pharmaceutical industry. The company had argued that the law was unconstitutional and that Medicare officials had violated procedural laws, but the judge dismissed those claims.
This follows similar rulings against other pharmaceutical giants such as AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, writes STAT’s Rachel Cohrs Zhang. The judge noted that Boehringer Ingelheim could leave the Medicare and Medicaid programs to avoid the negotiations, and rejected the argument that he was trapped. The decision strengthens the Biden administration’s position as Medicare approaches the deadline to complete price negotiations for the first ten drugs.
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